Turn it off and on again

“Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

If you’ve ever worked in IT, you either love or hate that phrase.

When it comes to debugging, some issues disappear when you do this. But it will be temporary.

It’s usually a sign of a resource leak of some kind: memory, handle, connections, something. Sometimes you can set up an automatic restart so you don’t have to think about it. Sometimes it’s in a black box.

Turning it off and on again isn’t a fix, but it is information. It’s a step toward understanding the root cause.