From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Uptime is a measure of the time a computer system has been "up" and running. It came into use to describe the opposite of downtime, times when a system was not operational. The uptime and reliability of computer and communications facilities is sometimes measured in nines. "Five nines" means 99.999% availability, which translates to a total downtime of approximately five minutes and fifteen seconds per year.

It is often used as a measure of computer operating system reliability and stability, in that this time represents the time a computer can be left unattended without crashing, or needing to be rebooted for administrative or maintenance purposes. Long uptime can also indicate negligence as many critical updates require reboot on some operating systems.

The uptime(1) command on Unix systems will show the current time, the uptime, the number of users and load averages for the past 1, 5 and 15 minute intervals.

$ uptime
10:52PM  up 1337 days,  7:45, 3 users, load averages: 0.21, 0.24, 0.23

The Uptime-Project, until 1st March 2007, collected data on uptimes from users, and the current record for longest uptime is 6 years, 98 days, 12 hours, 6 minutes and 44 seconds on a computer running SunOS 5.6.^[1] The uptime of a personal computer is sometimes displayed as a badge of honour on an email signature or web site/forum. This was especially true in the Windows 9x days, where Windows NT and Windows 2000 users would boast of uptimes of more than 30 days, whereas many real-world Windows 9x installations crashed more often. In more recent times very long uptimes for home users with Windows NT and Windows 2000 machines are less striking because the Windows 9x line has been replaced by the Windows NT-based Windows XP.

Netcraft maintains the uptime records for many thousands of web hosting computers.

Users of Windows XP Professional and Windows Server 2003 systems can type systeminfo at the command prompt to display all system information, including the System Up Time.

1. ^ Uptime Project - Toplist: Records (Now defunct). Retrieved on 2006-04-30.

• Myth of the nines for a discussion of downtime and availability
• High availability
• Downtime
• List of Unix programs
• Reliability disambiguation page

• Web sites with longest running systems by average uptime in the last 7 days
• The Uptimes-Project.org
• Tugs Uptime Project
• Uptime Project at The mrEriksson Network
• Free Website Uptime Monitoring Service
• Uptime Check
• Website Uptime Monitoring Service
• Free Uptime Reporting and Alert Service
• Free website monitoring, reporting and alerting Service
• uptime(1) – Linux man page on usr-share-man.org