News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

September 2, 2006

geekery

How long has your Mac been running?

Posted Sep. 2, ’06, 9:35 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Geekery

UptimeI noticed the following away message on one of my friend’s IM accounts the other day:

“my mac rocks. i haven’t rebooted it since last summer. 368 days and counting.”
While I haven’t had quite that much success, I do tend to keep my MacBook on or asleep, only rebooting when I’m applying system software updates or troubleshooting (or occasionally to free up RAM). And, of course, the spontaneous shutdown problem probably hurt my average.

While this does run counter to Apple’s propaganda, compare it to my old Windows work machine, which I used to shut down every night like clockwork, and which would often still be slower, by the end of the day, than George Lucas releasing the original, unaltered trilogy on DVD.

What about you, MacUser readers: how’s your uptime? To find out, launch /Applications/Utilities/Terminal and, at the prompt, type uptime.


15 Comments

Dan--the man said:

5 days 18 hours and 6 minutes.

(I checked my battery, and it's a good thing I did)

September 2, 2006 10:03 AM
pos said:

18 days 9 hours and 28 minutes last week. Got cut off today when power went =(

September 2, 2006 10:20 AM
knarz said:

29 days 17 hours and counting for an old G3 p-book. Only a little over a day for a dual G5 desktop that sometimes won't wake from sleep without a reboot.

September 2, 2006 10:38 AM
Jim said:

up 18 days, 17 hours and 5 minutes at the time of this comment.

September 2, 2006 11:23 AM
John Keogh said:

There's a nice Uptime widget: it also tells me my longest ever uptime was 27 days. This would have been two weeks longer but I shut the machine down before going on holiday.

September 2, 2006 11:34 AM
RD said:

Why mess with terminal? There are many Dashboard widgets that will monitor this for you. I'm currently at >90 days on my dual G5 Powermac.

September 2, 2006 12:26 PM
Mark said:

When I ran that test in terminal, it shows 2 users. Yet I'm the only one logged in. Why?

Mark

September 2, 2006 3:10 PM
pos said:

Why bother downloading a widget if its something we only want to check once for a comparison?

September 2, 2006 3:13 PM
Dan Author Profile Page said:

Don't sweat it, Mark—nobody's hacked your machine. :)

The reason more than one user shows up is because the UNIX underpinnings of OS X often run programs under different users. In the most basic setup, many processes are going to be run by your user account (mark, for example), while other system-level processes are run as the superuser, root. You can get a look at what user is running what process by running the following command in Terminal: ps -aux

The first column is the short username of the user running the process (this information's also available from the Activity Monitor). My machine actually has 4 users running at present: my own user, root, www (for the webserver) and windowse (running a process for CrossOver, I think).

September 2, 2006 8:59 PM
mathue said:

Uptime current 32 days, 20:27h
No crash current 70 days, 17:08h
No crash max 185 days, 00:38h

September 3, 2006 2:22 PM
Jason Author Profile Page said:

Your Mac is called TARDIS? Is it bigger on the inside, too?

September 3, 2006 9:27 PM
Anders said:

1241 days - I've been number 1 for a while now at http://www.hitup.org

September 4, 2006 7:11 AM
Scott Schuckert said:

Me, I turn 'em off every night. The last official recommendation from Apple (which I of course rigidly follow) was to "Turn the computer on when first needed, and turn it off if it won't be used for eight hours or more."

Oh, alright - I actually turn them off because the very bright, pulsating sleep light disturbs my pet parrots - who are themselves trying to sleep.

September 4, 2006 8:11 AM
Baron said:

I don't understand why "uptime" is such a big deal. Basically it just means that you haven't upgraded your system or installed any of the patches in way too long. I've seen webhosts that advertise individual machine uptime as a good thing. I don't want my machine to have a year for uptime, I want it as up to date as possible with any patches that come out.

September 4, 2006 5:08 PM
amazing doctor Z said:

Mac at work, a G4 933 Quicksilver: 20 days, 2 hours 26 minutes. Would have been longer if someone had not rebooted while I was on vacation. Record for this machine: 40 days. We reboot the Windows machines here upon arrival each day, and often at least once more during the shift.

September 4, 2006 8:12 PM

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