Good housekeeping.....

[Geoff777]

I've been using Macs for a long time, and back then the consensus was that it was a good idea to shut the Mac down about once a week.
The premise was that it did a more thorough tidying of files etc. in the system and put the system into better condition than when just putting to sleep.
I don't know if that was true, but it certainly seemed to me that when you shut it down, it took quite a bit longer to power off than when you did a restart, so I figured it probably was.

I'm now using a silicon Mac and to power down takes about 9 seconds during restart, and about 9 seconds for a full shutdown.

So is that old advice I've been following still valid, or completely out of date?

 

[Crazyblox]

I almost never shutdown or restart my mac unless I am doing a system update or I run into a situation that would otherwise be easily fixed by doing so (which is almost never). I don't experience performance degradation of any kind.

Sometimes I go out of my way to shutdown/restart the system just so I can hear the boot chime...

 

[9valkyrie]

Technically the "cache" is cleared (including all temp files) on a power cycle. That being said, except for system updates I never shutdown my Mac. There probably is some "housekeeping" during the operation of a Mac, but I can't say for certain.

 

[MBAir2010]

I shut down all of my macs every night and start them when they need to functionthe next day since 2001.

as far as those "sillycon" macs taking 9 seconds is a tad slow.
My early Intels take a few seconds to launch then start a program and ready to use within 9 seconds.

 

[Geoff777]

as far as those "sillycon" macs taking 9 seconds is a tad slow.
My early Intels take a few seconds to launch then start a program and ready to use within 9 seconds

I didn't use a stopwatch, just the old "a thousand and one, a thousand...." so might not be that accurate! 😀

 

[MBAir2010]

I didn't use a stopwatch, just the old "a thousand and one, a thousand...." so might not be that accurate! 😀

i know i was think of that while typing...,"HUH, OP times their mac launches...."

I had to fire up the MBA M1 yesterday and ESTA was under 3 seconds.
i would turn off anything is not in use, but i started using computes in the 1980s.

 

[Geoff777]

i know i was think of that while typing...,"HUH, OP times their mac launches...."

First time I did that was today, out of curiosity! Been using them since the 80's too.... 👍

 

[9valkyrie]

I have a MBA, so I just figure it's designed for me to just close the lid. If I had a desktop I'd be more likely to shut it down after use. I have used the MBA in closed clamshell mode and sometimes I just put the display to sleep, but eventually I'll disconnect it.

 

[theorist9]

From about 2003 to 2009, I had a PowerMac G5 running Panther through Snow Leopard. And it was rock–solid: I was able to run it continuously without issue for at least a year at a time.

However, as the OS's progressed, they became more complicated, and also increasingly less stable. [This may not have been just the OS's—it may have been the increasingly complicated OS's interacting with increasingly-complicated apps and their various kernel extensions.] With my subsequent Macs (2008, 2011, and 2014 Intel MacBook Pros, and a 2019 Intel iMac), I found my system would become wonky after increasingly short periods of uptime.

To avoid this, I found I've had to reboot at successively shorter intervals: It's gone from rebooting once/month, to twice/month, to once/week, to (currently) about twice/week. I.e. to get stable, trouble-free operation from my current 2019 i9 Intel iMac running Monterey, I need to reboot about twice/week.

I've never been able to get a good explanation for this. The best rationale I've heard is that rebooting returns your Mac to a known state—i.e., that, with use, things somehow get out of sync, and that you can put them back into sync by rebooting.

[I did once ask AppleCare about this, and they eventually escalated it to the enginnering team. The AC support person said the engineer recommended rebooting Macs about once per week to ensure stable operation.]

The one other bit I'll add is this: I've frequently had issues with OS updates—often they would fail, such that I'd either have to do them again, or have so many troubles after the update that I actually had to wipe my entire disk and do an update on a clean install and then restore everything else from my backup. It occurred to me that maybe the same extended-uptime issues affecting the computer's general operation were also affecting the updates, and the fix might be to only update after a fresh reboot, so that I'm doing them when the system is in a "known state".

So I switched my update procedure to only doing updates on a freshly–rebooted machine. And lo and behold, once I started doing that I no longer had issues with updates.

I know this all sounds like computer voodoo, but that's been my experience.

I don't have enough experience with Apple Silicon (my M1 MBP is a backup machine, and I don't use it often) to say if the issue is also present there.

 

[Smoovejayy]

Since getting an M1 Mac, I don’t restart my machine unless it is acting wonky or there is an update.

I haven’t had any issues with this.

 

[Allen_Wentz]

From about 2003 to 2009, I had a PowerMac G5 running Panther through Snow Leopard. And it was rock–solid: I was able to run it continuously without issue for at least a year at a time.

However, as the OS's progressed, they became more complicated, and also increasingly less stable. [This may not have been just the OS's—it may have been the increasingly complicated OSs interacting with increasingly-complicated apps and their various kernel extensions.] With my subsequent Macs (2008, 2011, and 2014 Intel MacBook Pros, and a 2019 Intel iMac), I found my system would become wonky after increasingly short periods of uptime.

To avoid this, I found I've had to reboot at successively shorter intervals: It's gone from rebooting once/month, to twice/month, to once/week, to (currently) about twice/week. I.e. to get stable, trouble-free operation from my current 2019 i9 Intel iMac running Monterey, I need to reboot about twice/week.

I've never been able to get a good explanation for this. The best rationale I've heard is that rebooting returns your Mac to a known state—i.e., that, with use, things somehow get out of sync, and that you can put them back into sync by rebooting.

[I did once ask AppleCare about this, and they eventually escalated it to the enginnering team. The AC support person said the engineer recommended rebooting Macs about once per week to ensure stable operation.]

The one other bit I'll add is this: I've frequently had issues with OS updates—often they would fail, such that I'd either have to do them again, or have so many troubles after the update that I actually had to wipe my entire disk and do an update on a clean install and then restore everything else from my backup. It occurred to me that maybe the same extended-uptime issues affecting the computer's general operation were also affecting the updates, and the fix might be to only update after a fresh reboot, so that I'm doing them when the system is in a "known state".

So I switched my update procedure to only doing updates on a freshly–rebooted machine. And lo and behold, once I started doing that I no longer had issues with updates.

I know this all sounds like computer voodoo, but that's been my experience.

I don't have enough experience with Apple Silicon (my M1 MBP is a backup machine, and I don't use it often) to say if the issue is also present there.

Do not denigrate computer voodoo. Remember SCSI?
;~)

IMO rebooting ~weekly is beneficial, including with modern hardware. If a Mac is somehow driving one to reboot daily or more often it usually means it is time for a new box with more RAM.

 

[coffeemilktea]

I only turn mine off when I leave the house.

 

[williamofockham]

ok, I'm a luddite, but I've been shutting down my micro-computer systems when not using them since I first started using them in the 70's. I suppose I was counting on them lasting longer through lower thermal fatigue, as well as a fresh boot to eliminate system corruption. that being said do as you wish my current system powers down at the end of the day (I forgot about manual backups that were required earlier - part of good shut down procedures)

 

[jz0309]

Starting with my 2017 iMac, I only rebooted when the OS was updated, and shut down when leaving the house for more than 3 days, and same with my M1Max Studio, never a problem.
My 3,1MPro got shut down frequently as it was loud and power hungry…

 

[Digital Dude]

Back when I used a Mac, I rarely had to restart it. Nowadays, I feel like operating systems accumulate more junk files than before. I even reboot my M2 iPad Pro at least once a day, just to be safe. 🤷‍♂️

 

[TechnoMonk]

Ability to run Mac for weeks with out restarting was big factor over windows for me. I rarely restart my MBP or my Linux workstation.

 

[bladerunner88]

Generally put my Trash Can to sleep at night, although do restart occasionally to clear the System. Also a big fan of

sudo /usr/sbin/periodic daily, weekly and monthly. - for housekeeping.

 

[Confused-User]

I've been using Macs for a long time, and back then the consensus was that it was a good idea to shut the Mac down about once a week.

Nonsense. Perhaps you heard that advice somewhere, but it was definitely not the consensus. Uptime on my Macs over the years tends to go to a few months, usually ending only when I install a security or OS update. That has been the case since at least the mid 90s. My MBP2012, no longer connected to the Internet and not getting security updates, has been up almost two years.

Rebooting does clear the cache but that will have no meaningful effect unless you're low on disk space or there's an app bug (which would affect that app, but not system stability). Rebooting will also clear any VM files from /private/var/vm (except maybe the sleepimage?) - annoyingly, the only way to do so, as MacOS doesn't do any consolidation there ever - but again, that doesn't matter unless you're extremely low on disk space.

All bets are off if you're running some flaky kernel module/system extension. And it's surely the case that different use profiles will have different odds of triggering various OS bugs. So some people are likely to see instability much more often than others.

The only solid advice is, if you consistently see your system getting flaky after x days, it's probably a good idea to reboot every .8x days, give or take. "x" will be different for everyone, and only you can know what it is for your machine. Strangers on the Internet will not.

 

[Populus]

I’m quite old school, so not only I power down my Mac, I also try to power down my iPhone and iPad at least once per week. And so far, so good!

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

I shut down my 2011 iMac every time I'm done using it. I won't have a 160-260 watt monster running, not being used 95% of the time. My M3 MBA gets restarted about once a month so far, whenever I feel like it is time.

 

[ignatius345]

I tend to just get lazy and let mine sleep instead of restarting, and will often have an uptime of 2+ weeks, or even more. But if something starts feeling slow, I'll do a restart cycle to clear the decks a bit.

I'm "tech support" for an elderly relative, and took a look at her MacBook Air's uptime out of curiousity. She lets it sit at a desk and just folds the screen down when she's not using it. Her uptime was like 18 months and I think it would've been a whole lot longer if I hadn't installed a software update on a previous visit. Pretty impressive, even if she did only ever use it for internet browsing. (She also never unplugged it from the wall, and right before we replaced it I checked the battery cycles and found it had something like 5 cycles over a period of 10 years.)

 

[Ctrlos]

Unless I’m on and off throughout the day, shutting down my Mac when it’s not in use is just common sense.

Whilst in standby I’m burning money on electricity, it’s not great for the environment and any appliances left on continually are a fire hazard. I even turn my router off at night for the exact sane reasons.

 

[johannnn]

sudo /usr/sbin/periodic daily, weekly and monthly. - for housekeeping.

What is this? How do you use it? How should I use it?

 

[Chuckeee]

At one time, I was running low on internal storage and you can use some of these cleaning utilities to delete other language packages from installed applications. This did free up some space (Really not that much) But every once in a while, there would be some app that deleting alternative language packages would break the app. This was because some apps would do a checksum on startup to ensure that they hadn’t been modified.

 

[ThunderSkunk]

I've been using Macs for a long time, and back then the consensus was that it was a good idea to shut the Mac down about once a week.
The premise was that it did a more thorough tidying of files etc. in the system and put the system into better condition than when just putting to sleep.
I don't know if that was true, but it certainly seemed to me that when you shut it down, it took quite a bit longer to power off than when you did a restart, so I figured it probably was.

I'm now using a silicon Mac and to power down takes about 9 seconds during restart, and about 9 seconds for a full shutdown.

So is that old advice I've been following still valid, or completely out of date?

Software aside, this was always talked about as being especially relevant to hardware. Coming from the analog electronics world (avionics & valve tube amps), it was conventional wisdom that an electronic circuit that remains steadily powered and operating at intended temps would work nearly indefinitely, and it was actually the shock of startup from cold that would cause wear & failure in the electronic components. You didn't want to power cycle a system unless you had to.

PC's kinda threw that out the window, and it was pretty common practice in a lot of co's to keep them powered down until you needed one, then you'd pull the plastic dust cover off, boot it up, use it, and shut it back down afterward. More recently, as windows stability fluctuated with every other release, the number of reboots those machines needed did too, but the lifecycle of the machines grew shorter than their lifespan due to moores law instead. I know people who just leave their personal computers on and never shut them off until there's a crash. The Macs actively being used in our office get shut down a few times per day on avg, booting between various OS's for the fragmented 32-bit/64-bit/mac/winxp/win11 file & app compatibility. Neither approach seems to make any difference to longevity at this point. If you look at capacitors and resistors & other components, from 25 years ago, there have been enough improvements by the component makers that lifespan really is just down to software now.