Rebooting routers as a normal maintenance routine

[kviola1]

It has been suggested that periodic rebooting of routers, as a normal maintenance routine, would be beneficial to sustain best router performance and device life. I disagree with that as power-down, power-up sequences appear to be more damaging to electronic equipment - similar to a light bulb that usually burns out when you flip the switch.

Any thoughts or references to maintenance best practices?

Thanks.

[Danilo Dy]

I disagree that rebooting any device (router, switches, servers, etc) will improve performance. From what I know people periodically reboots them because of known problem that cannnot be solve (believe it or not these problems exist). For servers that runs in-house applications, they are well known to have a Memory problem (specially those runs Java in any flavor), so far the workaround is to perform scheduled reboot of the system. I did heard of a switch problem that needs to reboot every 6 months (many years back), however I didn't get the detail of the problem.

However, I do recommend to have scheduled maintenance for updates/upgrade and when there is nothing to update/upgrade, perform a reboot of the device. This is because devices wear and tear, we don't want to wait for an event of power loss and when it came back the device will not boot. i.e. someone change the boot process accidentally/intentionally, IOS image gets corrupted, etc.. Knowing this during scheduled maintenance will have time to fix the problem. Learning the problem during production time cost a lot of money, headache, etc..

[Erik Molenaar]

Good or no good for electronics is not even the question. We have lots of routers. It would take an extra empolyee to achieve this, and my customers would complain about the extra downtime.

To my opinion routers are not supposed to be turned off, but for software upgrades or replacement.

Best regards