Should you log out of your OSX account once a day? Actually, no.
- [tw] : Log Out! (Once Per Day)
By some odd coincidence, three times this week I’ve come across Mac OS X users who don’t know the benefits of logging out. That is, they either leave the machine running at night (still logged into their user account), or they put the machine to sleep. They rarely — if ever — log out, and only reboot when “something is wrong” or after installing a system update.
My comment: that’s because you’ve run into what we call “normal people” who don’t live to serve their computer, but vice-versa.
My advice: log out once per day. You might just log out at night when you’re done using the computer, leave the machine running, then log in again in the morning. (It’s ok to let the monitor/display/screen/whatever-you-call-it go to sleep.)
My reaction: GTF out of here!
This accomplishes a couple of things, at least:
- If you generally run the same software applications most of the time, it will clear out a lot of memory and give those apps a chance to “start over.” This is a very good thing for nearly every modern program: most will run faster, and it will put a stop to some “weird behavior” (that’s the technical term). This helps on Windows, too.
- Leaving your Mac running (but logged off) at night allows the system (via a utility called cron that you’ll never see) to run some system maintenance utilities: another minor performance boon, and it will save a little space on your hard drive. (I actually don’t know if Windows does anything like this also.)
Actually, I’d rather have an operating system that’s intelligent enough to be able to deal with my using it all the time as the same user. Is that really too much to ask? “A utility called cron that you’ll never see” - no, please, condescend to me some more. (Cron will run whether you log out or not, actually. It runs all the time. Logging out has no effect on its runningness. I use it to do stuff to my email and other stuff all the time.)
This is stupid fatalism. Apple and Microsoft should be able to - in fact, can - write an OS that can handle my being logged on pretty much permanently, thanks very much.
Plus, there are huge disbenefits to logging out. I have to close all my documents. I have to quit my apps. Logging in and restarting those apps will take at least five minutes (conservative estimate), which I don’t feel like spending. Add those up over a week and you’ve got 25 minutes; over a month, it’s two hours; over a year, a whole day. Why should I give up a day of my time to lousy coding?
And of course that assumes that this step is necessary - which I don’t think it is. I’d give my uptime, except it’s rubbish at the moment, for reasons I’ll write about later.
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January 27th, 2006 at 9:49 pm
I tend to log out every night but only because the weird light show generated by a sleeping powerbook tended to prevent me from doing the same. But, as for it being better for the machine, I’m not convinced - indeed I always thought that OSX automatically ran what I might term housekeeping procedures in the early hours of the morning.
January 28th, 2006 at 12:32 am
Logging out has no benefits other than the security of you being logged out when you’re not at the machine.
This guy made some curious statements. Let me correct them.
1 . Logging out does not “clear out memory”.
Even if an application had a memory “leak” as I believe a previous version of Safari did, then logging out wouldnt solve the problem - a reboot would be needed.
2. Cron.
If your computer is running, Cron is running (unless you disabled/killed it).
Logging out has no effect whatsoever on cron. Also, you dont even need to leave the system on 24-7 for cron jobs to get run. Apple has scripted the same jobs to run on reboot if they havent been run in a set time frame.
The only benefit I could see to logging out, would be killing background processes that you dont know are running and bogging down the system. Or programs that are misbehaving. But these things fall under the definition of problems - not something you should be expected to normally deal with. If a program is launching background processes that dont end when it does, yes logging out will “clean your system up” - but a better solution would be to use software that wasnt written by a monkey.
January 28th, 2006 at 1:20 am
My iMac has been running 24/7 quite happliy for 12 months now, with only software updates from Apple causing the machine to reboot.
January 28th, 2006 at 1:32 am
Argh. Amen. Computers are not meant to require rebooting every day. How would the web function if every web server needed that, for instance? An Apache book I’ve read mentions an Apache web server that had been running for 1000 days, and only had to be rebooted when the guy moved house.
Was it Scoble who recommended something similar on Windows a couple of years ago, and got roundly laughed at by every Mac user on the web? If you have to re-boot your Mac every day, you’ve clearly screwed it up with nasty software.
January 28th, 2006 at 2:48 am
My office dual G5 Mac has been running 24/7/365 for more than two years now . . . and both processors are saturated at 100%. It also runs an ssh server so that I can log in and do maintenance. So far this has worked like a charm.
January 28th, 2006 at 5:57 pm
Log Out! (Once Per Day)
My instructions to log out once per day were well received by some, but not by others and it’s clear that I need to clarify a little. Mainly, there are three points I need to address. Firstly, my friend Flip pointed out that since Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger…
January 28th, 2006 at 6:03 pm
Again I Say: Log Out Once Per Day
My instructions to log out once per day were well received by some, but not by others and it’s clear that I need to clarify a little. Mainly, there are three points I need to address. Firstly, my friend Flip pointed out that since Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger…
January 28th, 2006 at 11:41 pm
“Clarifying a little” won’t stop it being dumb advice. I do know the difference between logging out and rebooting, thanks. Reading my post, where I pointed out that doing this would lose me an entire day every year, at the very minimum, might have helped.
Don’t log out. You don’t need to. OSX can handle it, because it’s built on a foundation that’s been used for multi-user systems that had uptimes (and user times) measured in, well, months or years. If you’ve not rebooted for a while, then users like www (the web server) or cron or indeed mysql (if you’ve got it) have been running happily all that time.
Once more: your computer is fine, if you’re on OSX. You don’t need to log out or anything else. Sleep will do fine, and save a ton of wear and tear on your HD, probably.
January 29th, 2006 at 8:23 pm
What a load of bogus rubbish. I have *never* logged out of OSX and have never had a problem. Logging out will do nothing at all. Stopping applications now and then will fix any memory issues and as someone pointed out cron runs anyway. This is UNIX for goodness sake not windows (where logging out does have definite advantages)
January 30th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
Logging out and back in makes my apps run slower the first time they are launched (e.g. Word has to re-scan for fonts (which I don’t get in the first place), Adobe apps require a longer startup time, etc.).
So, I’ll stick with Charles’ opinion, thank you very much. By the way, the “Paul Guinnessy” (see above) experience is my experience (only replace iMac with iBook).
February 2nd, 2006 at 2:27 am
Hey Charles, I couldn’t have said to better. Current uptime: 20 days (since the last update, as you might already guessed *har*), no logging out ever because I don’t have any time to waste.
April 27th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Leaving the computer on all night with Safari open and user not logged out. Are there any security issues or is it ok to do. Thanks!!!!
April 27th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
@Rose - why are you leaving the computer on all night? That uses up a lot of power, which you’ll have to pay for in your electricity bill. (Well, someone will.) But I don’t see any security issues really if Safari is just sitting there and you don’t have it surfing pages.
I’d say, though, that it makes more sense to put the machine to sleep, and set it to wake up in the morning - see the Energy Saver tab in System Preferences.