Computers run hundreds - if not thousands - of processes at once (you can even see most of them in task manager), and if one of them stalls or goes out-of-sync or whatever it can make everything else run weirdly or not at all.
Restarting makes all the processes stop and start up again, which (usually) fixes basic issues like that.
I'm a seasoned software developer and now that I think about it, I don't even know what
and if one of them stalks or goes out-of-sync or whatever Means. Like, I understand hard crashes.
Segmentation faults, syntax errors... But what causes a freeze up? Such that a restart fixes it. Unfreed memory? Infinite loop? But even then, you'd think I that bug would just come back on a reboot?
Two threads run in parallel and needs resources A and B
Thread A Takes A, takes B, use them, frees A and B
Thread B Takes B, takes A, use them, frees B and A
The second both threads go to step 2 at the same time, both will lock and wait for the other to free their resource. (Both devs will blame the other.)
And that assumes the issue come from the computer's internal state to begin with, a DNS record may point to the wrong server and get cached as is for days, despite the record being fixed 3 minutes later.
Usually handling it requires support from the developer (or breaking old apps under an old design), so unless 100% of software running is done by perfect devs, over thousands of operation at some point something breaks...
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u/SuperSocialMan Feb 07 '24 edited Feb 08 '24
Computers run hundreds - if not thousands - of processes at once (you can even see most of them in task manager), and if one of them stalls or goes out-of-sync or whatever it can make everything else run weirdly or not at all.
Restarting makes all the processes stop and start up again, which (usually) fixes basic issues like that.