What is your longest server uptime?

Publish Date: Jul 20 '18

15 16

Hi all! My name is Nick and I work as a Full Stack Engineer.
Part of my daily job is configuring and maintaining servers!

I work in a very hybrid environment, consisting of instances in the AWS Cloud, Oracle cloud (very interesting experience that I hope to share in another post) and dedicated servers in our own and remote datacenters.

Today I migrated a server running a LAMP stack to a new location, and was shocked at it's uptime. It may not be that much but for me is my current record! This server survived working on an average load of 91% for 437 days!

So my question is, what is your longest server uptime? How did you achieve it?

Comments 16 total

Ben SinclairJul 20, 2018

I don't know exactly but probably about a decade.

I worked for a while on recovering an application from a running server which hadn't ever been turned off and had "started making funny noises". I had to telnet to a SunOS box and grab the code and try to replicate functionality on a modern (well, modern for a few years ago) SUSE box. It wasn't just a case of updating the code, we weren't sure exactly how the system was supposed to work so I needed to run it in parallel on both systems to make sure my modifications weren't breaking functionality. That was fun :)
- Nick Jul 22, 2018
  
  That is some Sensei level stuff
Nguyen Tan VyJul 20, 2018

You should try kernelcare.com/ for kernel update without reboot.
- Nick Jul 22, 2018
  
  Awesome, will definitely check it out
Dian FayJul 20, 2018

SwiftOnSecurity on Twitter made the point ages ago that a year of uptime means that you've (hopefully!) applied a year's worth of patches, security fixes, and configuration changes but don't actually know if the system can come back up if+when it does reboot for any reason in your control or outside it. It's stuck with me.
- Nick Jul 22, 2018
  
  Very good point! I must confess this server had all mayor updates except the Kernell ones.
Nick CingerJul 21, 2018

I'm working on retiring a server now that has an uptime of 1070 days, so about 3 years!

Was happy to see it past the 1000 day mark, ha!
- Nick Jul 22, 2018
  
  Awesome! 1000 days is a lot!
  - Nick CingerJul 22, 2018
    
    Yeaaaaa, it's more of a thing to worry about, than a thing to brag about, as some have said haha.
    
    That's not to say that nginx or mysql haven't "gone away" several times in the past 3 years :)
MikeAug 23, 2018

Where I work, we have a server that’s been up for 7 years, it’s a 32bit database server, not public, on its own vlan, it’s quite a beast - it’s officially EOL for us now, so we’re migrating it to our new 64 GB RAM, 8x2T server) (full disclosure: we’re our own data center)
- Nick Aug 28, 2018
  
  Wow 7 years? That is a lot!
  
  Awesome server you are migrating to. Our SQLServer main server has similar specs but in a cloud provider.
Sean KilleenSep 16, 2018

Hey! I've noticed that in this post you use "guys" as a reference to the entire community, which is not made up of only guys but a variety of community members.

I'm running an experiment and hope you'll participate. Would you consider changing "guys" to a more inclusive term? If you're open to that, please let me know when you've changed it and I'll delete this comment.

For more information and some alternate suggestions, see dev.to/seankilleen/a-quick-experim....

Thanks for considering!
- Nick Sep 21, 2018
  
  Hi Sean! Thank you for pointing that out, I will change it right away. English is not my first language, in Spanish when you reference a group of people it is said in masculine form, I think I translated literally on my head.
  - Sean KilleenSep 21, 2018
    
    Totally okay! Lots of people do it. I appreciate you being willing to change it. Thanks so much! :)
    - Nick Sep 21, 2018
      
      I will totally keep this in mind for my next posts! Thank you!!!!
MikeApr 30, 2019

My longest server uptime is 7 years, the box was a database server, internal only. It was taken to the trash today. All cloud means all fun.

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Nick @nicolasguzca

What is your longest server uptime?

Comments 16 total