That has not been the case in my tests, granted they were mostly subjective as I don't have access to all the fancy big dollar toys (yet). I set a halide on a timer so that it would fire and run for an hour, then shut down and cool for an hour, then fire again. In 3 weeks the inner envelope was almost black and the bulbs output had shifted so far it you'd think it was a headlamp from the 50's. The cathode/anode were pretty much burnt away to nothing, and within days of that it wouldn't even ignite any more.