PowerBook Stays On 36 Days Straight, What's Your Uptime? (With Pic)

by , 1:20 PM EDT, June 15th, 2001

In the Unix world, stability is measured in how many weeks or months you go in between reboots, not days or hours. While many Mac and Windows users can go days or weeks without rebooting their machines, most can not and do not. Enter Mac OS X. Mac OS X, being based on FreeBSD, a *nix kernel, not only has the stability to stay on all the time, it has the built-in tools to tell you just long it has been on. One Mac OS X user, your author in fact, has had his PowerBook on since it was updated to Mac OS X 10.0.3 some 36 days, 17 hours, and 12 minutes ago. Here's a screen shot to prove it. :-)

This screen shot shows you repeated requests for the "uptime" of this PowerBook, a 400 MHz Pismo unit. If you would like to see this info on your machine, it's very easy. Launch your Terminal, which is in your Application folder in Mac OS X, and when the terminal window opens, type "uptime" without the quotes. The data that displays includes:

The first line displays the current time of day, how long the system has been running, the number of users logged into the system, and the load averages. The load average numbers give the number of jobs in the run queue averaged over 1, 5 and 15 minutes.

For those who do NOT want to mess with the terminal, the Mac OS X developer community has of course released a GUI app that will get this data for you. Better yet, it works in Classic as well. It's called Mac Uptime, and you can get it from VersionTracker. Mac Uptime is free.

What's your uptime? We have a thread on uptimes going on for this in our new forums, and we encourage you to post your uptimes there.

The Mac Observer Spin:

Hard-core *nix fiends compete on the number of months, or even years if some urban legends are true, they can keep their machines up. This Pismo has been up as long as it can be and still be running the latest Mac OS X update, and we are pleased as punch that it has been so stable. With the stability of Mac OS X, hopefully it won't be too long before we all get a chuckle at the idea of being proud of having a month of uptime.