Rebooting servers

I recently rebooted the VPS behind this site, after 251 days of uptime (womp womp). I did it to take a snapshot on Digital Ocean so I could use my setup for other VPSs I set up, but it had some unexpected benefits that made me wish I was a better sysadmin.

Turns out I had some processes running I completely forgot about, and they were taking up some RAM better used elsewhere. I hadn’t been keeping track since I wasn’t using more than 60% of my RAM, but extra free RAM always makes me happy.

Another benefit is that for some reason all the sites I run on that server, especially this one, are even faster. I’m not sure what I did there outside of rebooting, and I’m not sure what caused it.

The third benefit is that I didn’t realize I still had Apache installed, but it started on reboot and blocked nginx from starting. Bye bye.

I hate rebooting because it’s really not necessary most of the time and I believe I could have accomplished most of the above benefits without rebooting, but I’ll get better at that over time. Rebooting made me realize I need to get better at this stuff.