Every now and again at work, I am involved in helping end users (sales representatives) with their machines. Sometimes I am amazed at the beating those machines get, it is surprising they even boot after a year in the field.

Now, if you have ever tried to keep windows running for days or weeks without a proper reboot, you surely experienced the pain of its performance degradation. This is obviously more exaggerated on a work PC that has to undergo the beating I explained above. The result? Well, I have seen cases in which it would take 1 or 2 minutes MS Word to open. That translated into maybe 5 or more minutes in the case of Lotus Notes, and even worse for Siebel. This poor performance was all over the place, which eventually rendered the PC useless for day to day work. For the most part, a reboot was all it took to bring things to acceptable levels, but I always wondered how my Linux boxes would cope with such intense use.

Obviously leaving the hardware physical abuse aside, I decided I would keep one of my machines on for a month, going from suspend to standard use mode, and putting it under intense activity. In fact, I am typing these lines from the PC in question. In the two weeks that passed, here are some things I have been doing:

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