Well, rebooting to "solve an issue" usually means that you have no idea what you're doing, so you hit the panic button, right? That's why it's being ridiculed.

On the other hand, rebooting might be *required* to indeed solve an issue, if your operating system is crap. Another reason why it's being ridiculed.

So you're either a bad admin or you're using an inferiour OS. ;-)

Some people make this a strategy ("huh, what's going on ... let's reboot"). This is something that annoys me very, very much, especially at work. After the reboot, the actual error might indeed be gone, but ... me, as a sysadmin, I have nothing left to debug. I now have to wait until the error shows up again. And *then* I can try to find the real cause, assuming I get there first. Sometimes that's impossible, so I get the same error report from the user over and over: "$foo broke again, so I had to reboot!" Good lord.


All this has nothing to do with high uptimes, of course. My machines all have an uptime of just a few days or hours, but that's simply because I don't care about it. I don't try to prolong the uptime just for the sake of it. :-) I boot my computer in the morning and shut it down when I'm done. Servers, well, they keep running of course, but I reboot them on updates, too, so their uptime doesn't exceed a few days or weeks, either.

Why reboot my private servers after updates? a) As z3bra said, test-reboots safe you from trouble later on, b) I'm simply not bound by strict SLAs that force me to use something like kexec. :-) Just reboot, it's the easiest thing to do, why add any more complexity? It just takes a couple of seconds on my servers ... Yes, if you run massive applications, you might have a different opinion here.

I also rarely use standby/hibernation. It tends to introduce complexity (little annoying things like needing to re-apply hdparm after standby) with little gain, and to be honest, it happened to be a little buggy for me in the past. If I do use standby, I do it because I have to go to another office building and I don't want to re-open all my windows when I get there. :-)

Finally, as I do a loooooot of work in /tmp, rebooting has the nice effect of cleaning up stuff. This includes browser sessions, XDG caches, stuff like that. I only keep files that I really want to keep.