[H-GEN] Choice of distro for server

[James C. McPherson]

On 30/03/12 07:38 PM, Thorne, Stephen wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 02:22, mick <bareman at tpg.com.au
> <mailto:bareman at tpg.com.au>> wrote:
  
>> I have matured since then and now break those big files down into
>> more manageable chunks. That doc was only mentioned as an example of
>> the gains I could achieve with a carefully crafted kernel, there were
>> also useful day to day gains.

>  I call shenanigans on this assertion.
> Please provide Âquantitative evidence and repeatable testing
> procedure.

I call bullshit. None of this "shenanigans" pussyfooting.


Mick: your assertions are based on an incomplete understanding
of packaging, of kernels, of applications, and what seems like
a complete lack of understanding about how to tune a system.

Other commenters on this thread have tried to set you straight
about the inadvisability of making comparisons between 5-6 year
old versions of Debian and modern distributions, they've tried
to clue you in on selinux' possible involvement, and there has
been comment about the necessity or lack thereof of rolling your
own kernel.

Your comparison point was a userland application which you have
significantly overloaded, on a system which (from the snippets
of detail you've provided) sounds completely under-spec'd for
the task and then you blame the underlying operating system for
shortcomings in interactive performance. This is bogus.

To the best of my knowledge, modern releases of modern distros
have had a heckuvalot of work done to them to make sure that the
out of the box (ootb) performance characteristics are good, and
that they specify what minimum system characteristics should be.
Also, there's a heap of work going on in various upstream repos
to ensure that things _scale_ and _scale well_.

You suggest that the GIS tools on ubuntu are prehistoric, and while
you are happy to roll your own kernel you don't give that impression
about the tools and applications in the OpenStreetMap universe. Why
is that? Also, you mention a bunch of applications which aren't out
of place on a desktop workstation (which is what Intel designed the
Core2 series for) and all of these are available in standard package
repos; you can be confident that the default settings used to build
those packages have been tested and optimised.

One of the excellent benefits which comes with a packaging system
advanced from tarballs is that you can minimise the bits which are
put on your disks. If you don't want, eg, metacity - you don't
install it. Or if it's part of the default installation but you
get choices about other options, you can uninstall it and put something
else in its place. You don't give me the impression that you've
done much minimisation.

If you really want to run this 4Gb core2duo system as a map server,
why haven't you bumped up the ram? If you cannot do so, then I suggest
that you need to reevaluate what you use the system for.

If you aren't willing to use ubuntu (because you cannot or will not
customise what's installed), you're not willing to use debian because
you believe you need to roll your own kernel but you can't do that
successfully, you don't like gentoo and are "unimpressed" (but why?)
with centos, then as far as I'm aware you're left with any of the other
choices you can find by perusing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution
or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_Linux_distribution
and seeing which one matches your biases.



In the meantime....

*plonk*


  
James C. McPherson
--
Solaris kernel software engineer, system admin and troubleshooter
               http://www.jmcp.homeunix.com/blog
Find me on LinkedIn @ http://www.linkedin.com/in/jamescmcpherson