Rebooting is for Windows

One of the comment refers to netcraft for example of long Linux uptimes. According to <a href="http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html" rel="nofollow">http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html</a> Windows have better or just as good uptime as Linux servers. (maybe I am missing something)<p>The last time I used a MS web-server was ~10 years ago. I have almost exclusively used debian/ubuntu servers most of the time. Apart from the Linux fanboyism, what advantages does MSFT have as a server OS?

Yes. Shutting down every app, the OS kernel, and firmware, and restarting them for anything beyond a major OS upgrade is a reminder that Windows remains a desktop class OS.

While Windows has (and probably always will be) an OS that requires reboots for certain patches, it seems a bit biased of the article to ignore much of the work that's been done in recent (&#62;= Server 2003) versions of the OS to minimize this, while highlighting improvements such as KSlice in Linux.

Eventually your hardware will fail. If you can't even safely reboot your machines under controlled circumstances, you've already lost the uptime battle.

I agree with the people who are disparaging Windows Server OSes as still being desktop class. Coming from a VMS/VAX background, I feel much the same towards Linux.

I don't keep up on enterprise Linux stuff much but after reading this it concerns me that Linux seems to have better in-place upgrade support than most of Cisco's big iron stuff I've worked with. The 10000 series routers I presently work with only recently got support for in-place upgrades and it has a list of caveats a mile long. From a network architecture standpoint you can't always (affordably) design around downtime but at least your servers can stay up while your network is done now.

Not to say it's not cool, but saying "Look how much cooler linux is because of ksplice" is kind of silly considering determina was doing this years ago for Windows.

Well, that is at least one of the advantages of Common Lisp… ;)

Windows has greatly improved in this regard but it's still a huge pain point. I believe that the frequency of required reboots after patches is likely a leading cause for machines remaining unpatched.<p>Ultimately it comes down to lack of having "no reboots" as a clear goal. SQL Server has a pretty strong goal of being able to patch a running server without rebooting and they do a good job meeting that goal. For Windows OS it comes down to programmer laziness winning over in the absence of a directive to avoid reboots.