Modern sleep/suspend/hibernate is a real testament to engineering. It is incredibly cool that we can put computers in states that use as much power in a full day as a lightbulb uses in 5 minutes. My laptop and workstation have had uptimes of weeks. My server has had an uptime of a couple of months. Servers at work have years of ongoing uptime! But even though we can get away with never shutting down laptops, desktops, and servers, I claim that it is a very good idea to shut down (or atleast reboot) all computers atleast once per week.

  1. Updates Some updates require restarts to fully take effect. This is atleast on Windows and Linux, while I am not sure about Mac.

  2. Basic System Health Shutting down/reboooting a computer serves as a regular test that your computer can restart properly if it, for example, loses power abruptly. Even with servers, is it helpful to reboot regularly to ensure that all necessary services reboot. One workplace had a policy that most servers had to be rebooted atleast once per week. This was ok because all applications where deployed in a high-availability configuration, with atleast four nodes for any given application and a reverse proxy to route traffic to a node that wasn’t rebooting. Database servers with single master nodes are trickier. I have come to the conclusion that if you need a database master node to have less than one hour of downtime per year, your architecture simply requires a multi-master/no-master setup. In other words, postgresql with read-only replicas is an insufficient architecture for applications that require very little downtime.

    At the very least, weekly reboots are a great nuclear solution to application-level memory leaks.

  3. Forcing effective data persistance strategies Rebooting regularly invalidates the bad practice of relying on long-lived “snowflake”/non-reproducible state. This is, in my opinion, the most important one. Laptops are really not reliable, as far as computers go. The only way to know that you are saving your important document or spreadsheet is to fully turn off your computer and verify that you can open it again. The same could be said about every bit of important data in your life.

    I sometimes avoid fully shutting down my computer because I want to keep my web browser state (opened tabs). This is stupid. Just use bookmarks, either the ones built in to your browser of choice, or a self-hosted bookmark solution like Shiori . All of my important data is backed up regularly. The fact that I was hesitant to fully shut down my desktop at night indicated a gap in my backup/data persistance strategy.

  4. Energy and Money Putting your computer to sleep suspends the CPU and hard drives, but keeps the RAM alive. Some basic measurements on my computers indicate that RAM might use approximately 1W at idle. My electricity costs approximately $0.13/kWh. Assuming my computer is asleep for 20 hours per day (just to keep numbers simple), that works out to $1/year, or maybe $100 in a lifetime. That isn’t much, but it is something. I frequently go many days without using my laptop. When I open it for the first time after a couple/few days of sleep state, my battery might have gone from 80% to 70%. I don’t love that. With a full show down it might only drop from 80% to 77% or something.

For me a full shutdown involves either 4 clicks or a sudo systemctl poweroff but sleeping my laptop only requires me to shut the lid. On the flip side, booting might take 30 seconds (I think mainly to decrypt my drive) while resuming from sleep takes less than 10 seconds, including entering my password. But I am honestly never that time-sensitive.