Re: understanding postgres issues/bottlenecks - Mailing list pgsql-performance

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M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
| Luke Lonergan wrote:
|> Not to mention the #1 cause of server faults in my experience: OS
|> kernel bug causes a crash.  Battery backup doesn't help you much there.
|>
|
| Well now ... that very much depends on where you *got* the server OS and
| how you administer it. If you're talking a correctly-maintained Windows
| 2003 Server installation, or a correctly-maintained Red Hat Enterprise
| Linux installation, or any other "branded" OS from Novell, Sun, HP, etc.,
| I'm guessing such crashes are much rarer than what you've experienced.
|
| And you're probably in pretty good shape with Debian stable and the RHEL
| respins like CentOS. I can't comment on Ubuntu server or any of the BSD
| family -- I've never worked with them. But you should be able to keep a
| "branded" server up for months, with the exception of applying security
| patches that require a reboot. And *those* can be *planned* outages!
|
| Where you *will* have some major OS risk is with testing-level software
| or "bleeding edge" Linux distros like Fedora. Quite frankly, I don't know
| why people run Fedora servers -- if it's Red Hat compatibility you want,
| there's CentOS.
|
Linux kernels seem to be pretty good these days. I ran Red Hat Linux 7.3
24/7 for over 6 months, and it was discontinued years ago. I recognize that
this is by no means a record. It did not crash after 6 months, but I
upgraded that box to CentOS 4 and it has been running that a long time. That
box has minor hardware problems that do not happen often enough to find the
real cause. But it stays up months at a time. All that box does is run BOINC
and a printer server (CUPS).

This machine does not crash, but it gets rebooted whenever a new kernel
comes out, and has been up almost a month. It run RHEL5.

I would think Fedora's kernel would probably be OK, but the other bleeding
edge stuff I would not risk a serious server on.

- --
~  .~.  Jean-David Beyer          Registered Linux User 85642.
~  /V\  PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A         Registered Machine   241939.
~ /( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey    http://counter.li.org
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