Monday, January 4, 2021

Zoom Rooms Weekly Restart

Zoom (via Rogue Amoeba):

Zoom Rooms weekly system restart functionality will restart your computer weekly with the following conditions[…] By default, the Zoom Rooms computer will restart on Saturday, but you can also select a day for the restart.

The alert says this is for “best system performance.”

Dan Kuehling:

Only on their Zoom Room app for dedicated Zoom powered conference rooms. It doesn’t happen on the regular Zoom app.

Marc Edwards:

I have so, so many questions about this alert and the entire process that led to it.

Matt Gallagher:

During the Big Sur betas, Zoom caused WindowServer to leak memory – about 1GB per hour. I was restarting every few days. My guess is there’s a similar Apple bug they’re working around.

And apparently a Windows one, too, since the feature is also available in that version of the app.

Previously:

Update (2021-01-27): Peter Steinberger:

People are mocking Zoom for having an automated restart feature. I’m currently building exactly that for our CI.

The M1 Mac mini needs daily reboots so it doesn’t randomly fail to start the iOS Simulator. Something leaks here.

2 Comments RSS · Twitter

Haha, preventive reboots. I worked on an application to remove memory leeks. It was rebooted frequently, and a fix was not necessary, but with the user base growing, it now was scheduled for a reboot every day, so that was not feasible anymore... And it turned out I fixed it within a day. Four more days for an analysis and "prove" that it was fixed...

The gall of an application developer to believe they should control your entire system is astounding. A user should decide when to restart their system and nobody else. Not Apple, Not zoom, only the user. I imagine if you were performing a restore or long rendering task or similar overnight. I'd be pretty upset if it was a completely different application that interrupted that.

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