Should routers be reloaded occasionally?

[Craig Shrimpton]

I just noticed that I have a router that's been up for over six months. Do I
need to periodically reload these devices or should I let them "run till they
drop?"

-Craig

[David Royer]

Hi,

Not really except if you're doing any operations needing a great memory
load: multilink virtual-template (ppp) which fragment the memory.

If you're using these kinds of operations, depending how much memory you
have, you should reload sometimes your router. (We have a 4500 w/ 32Mo
using multilink virtual-template and we reload it each months.)

David Royer | "Broken? Hell no! Uniquely implemented."
Cybercable Paris | - me
Tel: +33 1 53 44 87 52 |
Fax: +33 1 53 44 83 59 |

[Patrick Colbeck]

Is this a sign of the times or what ! You shouldn't really have to reboot
any kind of computer (and a router is just a specialist computer) at all
except maybe when it has been reconfigured or had some kind of upgrade.

I guess what with Windows and NT people are starting to expect that a
computer needs rebooting reasonably regularly just to keep it healthy.

Seriously though you should be able to let the router just run and run. You
might want to do a "show mem" and a "show proc" every so often just to make
sure you don't have a runnaway process or a memory leak (not unkown with
some versions of IOS). In all probability though if its been running for 6
months then its fine and you might as well leave it.

Not rebooting things also makes them last longer as the most stress is
placed on the electrical components as they go through thermal changes as
they heat up or cool down as they are switched on or off.

Pat

On Fri, 04 Sep 1998 04:04:11 GMT, Craig Shrimpton <cra...@os.com> wrote:
>I just noticed that I have a router that's been up for over six months. Do I
>need to periodically reload these devices or should I let them "run till they
>drop?"
>
>-Craig

--
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Patrick Colbeck
Senior Technical Analyst
_________________________________________________________________________
Azlan Ltd Tel:+44 (0)1904 691997
Lion House Fax:+44 (0)1904 692112
4 Pioneer Business Park
Clifton Moor Email:Pat.C...@esc.azlan.co.uk
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_________________________________________________________________________

[Daniel J McDonald]

Craig Shrimpton wrote:
>
> I just noticed that I have a router that's been up for over six months. Do I
> need to periodically reload these devices or should I let them "run till they
> drop?"
>
> -Craig

Let them run! 2 years of uptime is not too short.
I ran into a problem with a Catalyst that would cause it to reboot every
40 weeks (a bug in 1.4) We ran into those reboots 4 times before I was
able to get a service outage.

Long uptimes are expected around here....
--
Daniel J. McDonald Intel Corporation
daniel.j...@intel.com Americas Region IT
1.503.677.5542 (voice) CCIE # 2495
Disclaimer: Not speaking for Intel Corporation

Make SPAM illegal - Join CAUCE - http://www.cauce.org

[Shamsul Adzmi Hamzah]

On Fri, 04 Sep 1998 04:04:11 GMT, cra...@os.com (Craig Shrimpton)
wrote:

>I just noticed that I have a router that's been up for over six months. Do I
>need to periodically reload these devices or should I let them "run till they
>drop?"
>
>-Craig

Hi,

You don't need to reboot it if there is no problem with it.

I have a router which have 2 links doing load balancing. Everything
is the same (i.e matric & bandwidth). After certain time, it seems
that one link will have more traffic going through then other link.
What I normally do is just clear the i.p cache and everything back to
normal. No need to reload.

Thank you,

Shamsul Adzmi Hamzah
Network Development,
TMnet, Malaysia

[pe...@cisco.com]

In our test lab we have machines up for more than a year... no problems.

You don't need to reboot anything, in fact if you have a problem you should
start gathering information about the nature of the problem instead of erasing
all symptoms & data by reloading it.

Take a look as well at :

- sh proc mem
- sh proc cpu

look at input queues (sh int) & buffers...

on a c5000 there is

- sh mbuf

btw, regarding a previous post : a cat running 1.5 SW did not have the good
memeory management there is in the current SW.

Again, if depends on the problem what you need to look at, if no problem then
don't reboot.

Patrick

In article <35F012...@intel.com>,
Daniel.J...@intel.com wrote:

> Craig Shrimpton wrote:
> >
> > I just noticed that I have a router that's been up for over six months. Do
I
> > need to periodically reload these devices or should I let them "run till
they
> > drop?"
> >
> > -Craig

> Let them run! 2 years of uptime is not too short.
> I ran into a problem with a Catalyst that would cause it to reboot every
> 40 weeks (a bug in 1.4) We ran into those reboots 4 times before I was
> able to get a service outage.
>
> Long uptimes are expected around here....
> --
> Daniel J. McDonald Intel Corporation
> daniel.j...@intel.com Americas Region IT
> 1.503.677.5542 (voice) CCIE # 2495
> Disclaimer: Not speaking for Intel Corporation
>
> Make SPAM illegal - Join CAUCE - http://www.cauce.org
>

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