How often should I restart my iMac?

To me, having read a ton of EtreCheck reports here that record both time since last restart and how much virtual memory (VM) is being used, the amount of RAM installed may make a difference.

Based on what I've seen in those reports, I generally recommend:

• Macs with 4GB RAM probably should be restated every 3-5 days.
• Macs with 8GB RAM seem OK with 7-14 days before VM starts using over 500MB of swaps.
• Macs with 16GB, like my 2017 iMac 5K, seem not to give a fat rat's patooty.

You can see Swaps in Activity Monitor faster than by using EtreCheck:

That's my iMac 5K sampled a few minutes ago. I think I last restarted about three weeks ago after returning from a trip. I usually power down when I'm going to be gone more than a day,

I have a 24" M1 and because it boots to login in 17 seconds I don't feel the need to leave it on over night, but if I use it during the day I just press the lock key which logs out and turns the screen off

My Macs are powered down at night, and back on in the morning after I fetch the morning dark roast. I also power them off if I am out of the house for more than an hour. Been doing this for years without any Mac reliability issues. I almost never boot into Safe Boot mode anymore…

On the other hand, I sleep my Mac’s for weeks on end without an issues. I’ve actually gone as long as, until the next update required a restart. The catch 22 here is, that I mostly only run native macOS App’s and then quit them when they are no longer needed.

I do not restart my MacBook unnecessarily. As a rule, a reboot is needed after installing the macOS service pack. In other cases, I do not see the need to restart the computer.

Thanks.

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I have mine set to auto start and auto shutdown daily but not really required. I would start at least every 2-3 days to clear out the system.

Some people rarely ever do. I turn mine off if I am not using it for a while, but I would say once a month would be a good compromise.

There is no rule and everyone does theirs a little differently, me about 1x per week. My wife's about 1x per month.

Of course, the real question is how often should you start in Safe Mode?

Excellent point, I tend to restart in Safe Mode about 1x per month but I don't have reminder for it either.

It clears out some system caches and the like. But again, like you I only ever use it if there's an issue. My two Macs are restarted for System Updates.

And I turn my Mac Book Pros off for take-off and landing, if the Flight attendants insist. 😃

We restart about one a week; seems to work well for us given the lack of problems we have.