• Apple OS X

  Rebooting Often (on purpose)

  Posted by Dave Martin on June 13, 2006 at 9:43 pm

  Hi Guys

  I’m an old PC guy(new to Mac). I reboot my computers often and shut them down every night as a matter of course. This is good for PC’s to get a “fresh start”. Is there any problem doing this with Macs on a frequent basis?

  Thanks for any replies…

  Tim Martin – MacBook Pro – 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo – 2 gig Ram -FCP Studio 5.1 – QT 7.1 – OSX 10.4.6 – Lacie D2 dv external drive

  Dave Martin replied 19 years, 11 months ago 2 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Curtis Thompson

  June 13, 2006 at 9:52 pm

  hello…

  [Tim Martin] “Is there any problem doing this with Macs on a frequent basis?”

  for the most part, the primary problem would be that you’d be losing all that time watching your computer reboot… 🙂

  the main reason it helps to shut down any computer is because of memory leaks – almost every app will have them, even though they are bugs and shouldn’t occur…but it’s a fact of life in computer software. alas in windows, it’s much more common, so if you check your task manager over time, you’ll see more and more memory tied up even though you don’t have any apps open. so you have to reboot to get around that…

  but unix is much better at dealing with this and has much fewer memory leaks to begin with. even os x is pretty good and you shouldn’t really need to reboot it very often (if it all)…however, 3rd party programs are susceptible to the same memory leak issues that all software is, so if you use a lot of those, then just use your activity monitor to keep an eye on memory usage and other system stats – but also keep in mind that unix is generally better at cleaning up after memory leaks, so in general, you won’t need to worry about rebooting anywhere near as much as you did on windows boxes…

  hope that helps a bit! 🙂

  sitruc
• 

  Dave Martin

  June 13, 2006 at 11:45 pm

  Thanks Curtis

  I don’t actually spend too much time watching the computer…this things boots in moments as opposed to minutes…come to think of it…why is that?

  Tim Martin – MacBook Pro – 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo – 2 gig Ram -FCP Studio 5.1 – QT 7.1 – OSX 10.4.6 – Lacie D2 dv external drive
• 

  Curtis Thompson

  June 14, 2006 at 12:02 am

  hello…

  quicker startup is just typically a more efficient process in the osx world – there’s not a given single set of reasons for that, but just faster startup of daemons, network functionality, etc
• 

  Dave Martin

  June 14, 2006 at 2:49 am

  Interesting…thanks Curtis

  Tim Martin – MacBook Pro – 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo – 2 gig Ram -FCP Studio 5.1 – QT 7.1 – OSX 10.4.6 – Lacie D2 dv external drive

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