Watchdog - can anybody explain how it works?

I’ve experienced frequent reboots on my RB333 with ROS 3.0rc10. It has rarely run for more than some hours or at most a day before rebooting without any reason.
From another post I was recommended to disable the watchdog. I did, and now it looks like the router is more stable already, it has already run for 60 hours! Celebrate! :smiley:

Can anybody please explain how this watchdog works and at which events it is supposed to reboot the router?
I know there is a feature for pinging a specific host and rebooting after a certain timespan without response, but initially I never filled in the address field, just left the “watchdog timer” checkbox checked, as it is by default. This resulted in reboots every now and then.

Then I unchecked the “watchdog timer” checkbox and everything seems to be fine, at least so far.

Is this different between RB models and between 2.9 and 3.0? I have an RB112 with 2.9.40 that has run for months without any reboot.