I use the Linux operating system at my place of work (I’ll refrain from revealing the flavour, lest we descend into religious wars). Because we do not have servers to provide common data storage or processing power off-site, I leave my machine running constantly and it acts as a server so I may access my materials whenever and wherever I need. This week, a kernel update was rolled out, meaning I needed to reboot. Just out of interest I wanted to see how long the machine had been running since the last reboot so I did:

$ uptime
15:02:01 up 63 days


Now I realize 63 days is peanuts in server time, but I still continue to be impressed that after more than eight weeks my system was as quick and responsive as when freshly booted… maybe I’m still coloured by my earlier experiences with a certain popular operating system. It certainly made me think on when I friend of mine, who uses Windows Vista and keeps her machine running overnight like me, remarked that it was time to reboot her machine because it had been running all week and was starting to run really slow.

Is this really still an issue with Windows machines? I’ve still never heard a satisfactory answer as to why this happens.