Hello, on routers with OpenWrt installed, does constantly restarting or repeatedly reinstalling the same software affect the lifespan and performance of the device? Or is it better to install it once and not tinker with the device too much?
We had a habit of rebooting the routers provided by ISPs.
Restarting an OpenWrt router does not have any impact on the longevity of the hardware (or firmware/configs), but it should not be necessary. If you find that you need to do this as a workaround for some issue, that usually points to a misconfiguration that should be investigated and solved at the source. In some rare circumstances, this type of thing could be indicative of a bug in OpenWrt and in those cases we'd want to know about it so that it can be reported and resolved in the code (bugs like this are quite uncommon, but they do show up from time to time).
This can, over time, damage the hardware. It is a function of the number of "write cycles" that the embedded flash storage can withstand. Typically the memory in these devices are not rated for a high write-cycle lifetime (since they're not "general purpose" computers and don't need that type of storage). At human time/frequency scales, reinstalling the software repeatedly is not usually a problem because even the lowest end of the flash memory modules can support 10's of thousands of write cycles, but this can very quickly be exceeded if you have a process/script that writes to disk frequently or re-installs on a schedule. But here, too, there is no reason to reinstall in the vast majority of cases. Full system updates should be installed as soon as reasonably possible, but individual packages do not usually need to be re-installed/updated (and it's not recommended to do bulk upgrade of the packages).
Tinkering is fine... and again, at human scale, that shouldn't be a problem. But no need to re-install or reboot in most situations.
This is probably because many ISPs don't care about reliable firmware. OpenWrt is generally very stable.
Thank you sir
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