Measure system runtime with tuptime Stopwatch

Article from Issue 241/2020

Author(s): Tim Schürmann

How long has the Linux server been running without rebooting? And how often has the system rebooted without you noticing? These questions and more are answered by the tuptime tool.

If a Linux system has been running for a long time, this is definitely proof of its stability, but – depending on the distribution – some updates might be waiting to install. Conversely, if the system reboots very frequently, there may be a configuration error – or maybe a hardware component is slowly deteriorating. On a workstation computer, such restarts are quickly noticed, but not necessarily on a remote server that is running quietly and well away from the action.

How long a system has been running continuously can be determined at the command line by a call to uptime. But you might also want to try tuptime [1], a similar tool whose name is based on a contraction of "total uptime." It outputs far more information, including valuable information in the form of the number of reboots and the kernel version used.

Installation

While uptime is available on almost every system, you need to install tuptime separately. Some distributions already have the tool in their repositories, such as Debian and Ubuntu. Arch Linux users will find tuptime in the AUR and CentOS users in the EPEL repository. On any Linux system, you can install the tool with the following:

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