Talk:Uptime

Systeminfo doesn't show uptime on all XP Pro systems
Anyone know how to fix this?

"System Up Time: N/A"

psinfo or other tools can't get uptime neither.

Uptime Project is closing it's doors

Dear Uptime-Community,

After the last very successful 5 years with about 1.7 million data records and more than 20000 active users, we would like to say "thank you" to everyone who helped the project grow to what it is right now.

+++ We are very sad to say it, but we decided to close down the Uptime-Project on the 1st of March 2007. +++

Surely this wasn't an easy decision because of all the time we invested in the project but we don't have enough time to keep the site alive. Another problem is, and always was, the increasing costs for servers and traffic. (Thanks to our sponsors!)

Please shut down all the uptime-clients you're running because we can't keep the domain name forever and we don't want somebody to get his hands on the user data the clients are sending.

Why don't we give away the project for free and let somebody else run it? That question is easy to answer. With more than 20000 users, there is a lot of user data in our database (for example the email-addresses). We don't want somebody to get his hands on this data to maintain the user.s privacy.

Again, thank your very much for competing in the Uptime-Project!

Sincerely the Uptime-Project staff

The content of the email above is not privileged and as such I believe it to be acceptable to post it here. I think the article needs an update as well as alternatives to the Uptime Project.

K.satirli 08:31, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

I just got here. Didnt know about the uptime project. I came a wandering because of this;

[poobear@poobearshouse] # uptime 05:01PM  up 13705 days,  15:59,  2 users,  load average: 2.24, 4.05, 4.64

Anyone know how that happened? :)


 * --Hm2k (talk) 09:22, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

Uptime can be abounegligence?
The article states that long uptime can be caused by lack of maintainance, as updates would not be installed. However some systems (such as Linux with KEXEC or IBM Mainframes which run their O/S inside VM) can have the entire system, including O/S kernel reloaded without reboot or interupption of service. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.161.46.97 (talk) 19:45, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Do you have any citation of this? --Hm2k (talk) 09:23, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

Confuses uptime with reliability
As it stands, this article confuses the notion of time since failure with that of availability. Both are sometimes casually referred to as "uptime", but they are different measurements with different units.

The Unix utility uptime prints the time since last reboot -- roughly a measure of time since failure, although rebooting a machine does not always mean service failure. This is also the sense of "uptime" which some hobbyists brag about -- with the implication that having to reboot your machine is a sign that it is unreliable, crashy, or buggy and in need of frequent critical updates.

Availability -- whether measured in "nines" or in defects per million or what-have-you -- is a property of a service, not necessarily an individual machine. This is not at all the same as time since reboot; you can have bad availability without reboots, due to software bugs, overloaded servers, or other problems: a service can be flaky without being hard down.

Other features such as load-balancing, failover, and N-tier architectures make it more complicated to generalize about the availability of a service. But in any event it is important to distinguish time-since-failure from availability. --FOo (talk) 09:00, 19 September 2009 (UTC)


 * I agree; this article is mainly about system uptime rather than availability; the high availability article covers the topics you mention above; thus I have removed them from this article. This solves the problem. --Hm2k (talk) 09:36, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

Fifteen or Sixteen seconds?
Or perhaps it is somewhere between the two? In describing the "Five Nines" uptime, the text states five minutes and fifteen seconds; the table shows 16 seconds instead. Which is correct? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.178.73.68 (talk) 13:00, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
 * This is detailed in the high availability article; so I removed the entry from this article; thus solving the problem anyway. --Hm2k (talk) 09:37, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

Requested move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section. 

No consensus to move. Maybe split and a dab page. Vegaswikian (talk) 19:13, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Uptime → System uptime — Disambiguation; This article is about system uptime, rather than availability. Hm2k (talk) 09:40, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
 * No need to rename, although it could do with more coverage on non system uptime. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 10:24, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Perhaps the high availability article should be merged into this article? --Hm2k (talk) 10:28, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Actually, I've just noticed, this appears to be about the uptime (command) on unix systems as per the footer. There's actually quite a lot of topics to cover in a single article... --Hm2k (talk) 22:02, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

add a new wiki page world record uptimes
Are these mainframes that were on 20 years uptime continuously? Do space probes such as pioneer and voyager really have decades long uptime? What is the world record for various systems?

Do the chips "disintegrate" after 10 or 20 years? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.76.204.16 (talk) 16:04, 17 February 2012 (UTC) There are some ( discontinued) projects for collecting ( and verification) uptime records. For example Uptime Wars application for android. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.99.58.178 (talk) 17:14, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

Uptime challenge is still running. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.173.209.111 (talk) 15:10, 15 July 2017 (UTC)

Record should be listed for each platform separately. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.110.232.249 (talk) 18:33, 3 December 2016 (UTC) gentoo :1739 days Windows: 131 days — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.160.175.66 (talk) 17:30, 13 December 2016 (UTC) Android: 816 days — Preceding unsigned comment added by 178.41.106.80 (talk) 16:13, 7 December 2016 (UTC) FreeBSD : 2222 days — Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.160.215.2 (talk) 09:04, 28 February 2017 (UTC) Each platform should have its best uptime shown on its article ( on Wikipedia). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.5.203.204 (talk) 12:15, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

Windows 7 boot time unreliable
It should probably be mentioned that the boot time determined from systeminfo seems to miss out on sleep/hibernate time. If I run my computer for 6 hours but let it sleep for 2, it will show a boot time of 4 hours previous (i.e. current time minus run time where run time excludes sleep time). This has been noted on a number of forums.

I'd update the article, but I have no idea what the rate of time passage is for sleeping/hibernating computers. Presumably, the clock ticks slowly, not at a zero rate. 99.245.248.91 (talk) 00:05, 5 March 2013 (UTC)


 * I updated the article and left out any mention of the exact magnitude of the discrepancy. 99.245.248.91 (talk) 18:37, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

Uptime re Reliability or Duration
I've seen "uptime" used in this sense of 'hours since last crash/reboot, or the related 'time of last crash/reboot'. But I've also seen it used as a term for Reliability spec, or as an uninflated Availability, and wonder if these should also be mentioned : Markbassett (talk) 21:30, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Reliability sense - the duration of operation required, e.g. must be able to perform in 48 hours continuous operation with a 95%+ confidence of no outage.
 * Availability sense - uninflated as in what percentage of 365/7/24 will it respond for a user, hence not allowing any excluding of scheduled downtime, admin time, etcetera, e.g. 99.2%+ uptime last month

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Uptime. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20100316181615/http://www.redhat.com:80/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/en-US/Reference_Guide/s2-proc-uptime.html to http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/en-US/Reference_Guide/s2-proc-uptime.html

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Cheers. —cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 22:08, 17 October 2015 (UTC)

Windows false Uptime
This article currently appropriately warns readers that typical Windows reported system UPTIMES are quite misleading/false: they report total elapsed time since some long-ago boot/turn-on event. They ignore sleep and hibernation states (pretending the system was on and running OK the whole time) and in some cases also ignore times of being totally turned off, shutdown, and even unplugged... Which leaves us with the question, how can real uptimes be obtained: the time since the computer last turned on in any way (from sleep, hibernation, etc); or the total elapsed time since some long-ago boot, *minus* all time spent in sleep or hibernation etc? (This presents a deep philosophical issue for this article: should it be describing what Uptime is supposed to mean, or the way Windows seems to use the term? My answer would be, it should clearly explain all various reasonable meanings of the term in this technical context.)-71.174.176.65 (talk) 14:06, 31 March 2016 (UTC)


 * I don't think this issue is within the scope of this article (ie. the discrepancy between reported uptime and real uptime – whatever your definition may be). In the case of Windows there's no simple way to make sure the system has been uptime within a certain, past period unless you've continuously monitored the system, eg. with a local service monitoring standbys, hibernation and such. For a very primitive "real" count you could use a scheduled task repeating every minute that increases a file counter (set to 0 at boot, obviously). --Zac67 (talk) 17:19, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

There is much Internet mention of this issue, such as: superuser.com/questions/564119/windows-8-reports-wrong-uptime-possibly-total-hybrid-boot-uptime

It is quite easy to find the relevant raw data in Event Viewer > Windows Logs > System > Filter Current > Event ID = 1,42,107.

But it takes some study and experimentation to interpret this data. Plenty useful if you have some particular problem that you need to figure out, about wake/sleep/etc. But way too much bother if you just want to see a convenient useful graphic timeline representation of actual computer usage patterns. And there seem to be no common free tools that make this basic information accessible, unfortunately. (Is the situation any better in the non-Windows world?)-71.174.176.65 (talk) 20:26, 31 March 2016 (UTC)