UNIX® systems are regarded as being considerably more 'stable' than other operating systems. This means they crash less often, and need rebooting less often. In fact, some UNIX systems stay up for days or even months at a time.
You can find out how long the UNIX system you are using has been up for, by using the 'uptime' command. This gives you several pieces of information:
The load averages show how busy the system is. Typically, there are 3 values, which represent averages over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes. The values show the average number of jobs waiting to run at any one time. A value less than 1.00 means that the system was idle for at least part of the time. Values of 1.00 or greater indicate that the system is fully loaded, i.e. very 'busy'.
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