Quote Originally Posted by radargeek View Post
A bigger question/possible concern is how many write cycles is the internal flash memory storing the statistics counts rated for?

After a few years of power cycles, could those flash cells wear out? Obviously some are getting written to on every power cycle.

Just out of curiosity, why does ALP count power cycles in the first place? Does it serve a purpose?

Other than that slight amount of flash cell wear, frequent power cycles shouldn't cause any other issues. Presumably the CPU "boots up" very fast, so a quick power cycle shouldn't corrupt anything (except maybe the power-cycle count if it's still being written to when power is cut). It's not like Windows where there's a file system to take care of (outside of any USB drives plugged in).

Another possible issue, if they didn't code/test this possibility, is if the count reaches its maximum value and overflows. It'll be interesting to see what happens when it reaches 9999, or 65535 (16-bit unsigned integer max value). If it's 32-bit chances are it'll never reach the max before the flash cells wear out or AL comes out with something new.
There is plenty of memory to store your power cycles and its just one of the many things that the ALP keeps track of. When a unit gets serviced it can help engineers with analyzing issues.