How Often to Stop / Restart Services?

Hi All -

I've asked this question of myself and a bunch of my collegues. The answers always starts out the same - 'Well, it depends...' and then the answers start to diverge. My personal preference for Win/SQL installs is to bounce services on the enterprise server every nite before backups kick in, and to bounce the web server services at the same time out of convenience. I also like to reboot the servers over the weekend but for no other reason than being superstitious. For iSeries/i5, I drop services similarly to Win/SQL, but don't IPL the box except for full system saves and/or PTF's.

Does anyone have any good rule-of-thumb guidelines that I can add to my thin knowledge base?

Thanks!

Like you said it depends....On My Windows/SQL Systems the web servers and the enterprise server every 2 weeks. On my current AS/400 system E1 services goes down nightly before the backup and the web servers are re-booted nightly after E1 comes back online. We only IPL after PTF's and if there is a need to.

Some of the AS/400 clients I have prefer to bring down the TCP/IP subsystem along with JDE services to make sure that nobody can connect and leave a file open during backups. This is a nightly procedure for them.

For Windows/SQL Server, those people tend to have server agents for their backup programs that can grab the data while SQL Server is up. They usually don't restart services until the weekend when they initiate a reboot. The reboots are a leftover habit from Windows NT/2000 days. I don't think they really need them under Windows 2003, but they like to make sure that memory is cleaned up every once in a while.

[ QUOTE ]
Hi All -

I've asked this question of myself and a bunch of my collegues. The answers always starts out the same - 'Well, it depends...' and then the answers start to diverge. My personal preference for Win/SQL installs is to bounce services on the enterprise server every nite before backups kick in, and to bounce the web server services at the same time out of convenience. I also like to reboot the servers over the weekend but for no other reason than being superstitious. For iSeries/i5, I drop services similarly to Win/SQL, but don't IPL the box except for full system saves and/or PTF's.

Does anyone have any good rule-of-thumb guidelines that I can add to my thin knowledge base?

Thanks!

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Uhhhh.....never.

Why in the world would one arbitrarily stop and restart a properly working process? I suppose job security but I can think of no other reason.....even on Wintel. Perhaps back in the days of NT 3.51 but doing so now is a waste of time.

Mr.T

My enterprise, batch, deployment, and web servers get restarted once a month to install microsoft patches. All of our servers in the company get bounced during that monthly outage. My terminal servers get bounced weekely over the weekend. I do a full PD package deploy three times a month, so that means that I bounce the JDE services on my enterprise and logic servers (services, not the whole server) three times a month.

Gregg

Actually, I automatically drop web services, terminal services and JDE services as part of my backup schedule - to ensure that the backups occur with no users on the system - this is usually no more than 10 minutes of "quiet time" on the system.

However, I very rarely stop the database services except to apply critical patches - on ANY platform. If the database server is working - why restart DB services ??! I doubt very much if SQL Server ever needs to be reset due to memory leaks - its very efficient at managing memory (after its been patched of course). So, I'm with BrotherKara on this one - there is no regular reset of database services!

Mr. T,

We reboot our JAS servers (IBM Websphere on Win2003) nightly after the daily incremental save of the enterprise server (AS400). We IPL the enterprise server weekly after a full save (may be over-kill, but we are not a 24/7 shop). The AS400 startup program deletes all SQLPKG objects that are owned by ONEWORLD and clears the logs in the IFS. When those are complete, the E1 services are started.

For a WIN/SQL - XE - Fat Clients - we restarted the Services for the following - when we installed windows patches on the Enterprise Server or database configuration work.

For a Solaris/Oracle - XE - Citrix - instance - we restarted the Services once a week - as we would do a Cold Backup of the Database. The Citrix Servers were rebooted every night.
The Enterprise Server was rebooted only in rare instances.