On rebooting: the unreasonable effectiveness of turning computers off and on
Back in the day, when I was cutting my teeth on embedded systems, I read an Intel Application Note - probably for the 8051.  The section about managing watchdog timers stated that it is often good practice to deliberately let the watchdog time out periodically, at a convenient time.  Then the system would be reset to a predictable state regularly, and failure states leading to unplanned watchdog timeouts would occur less frequently.To this day, all my systems which are intended for prolonged unattended operation reset themselves at least once a day.