Re: Machine available for community use

Tom Lane wrote:
> Greg Smith <gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com> writes:
>> On Wed, 25 Jul 2007, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> Gentoo always leaves me wondering exactly what I'm running today,
>>> and I think reproducibility is an important attribute for a benchmarking
>>> machine.
>
>> At this point, there's enough performance variations even between
>> individual Linux kernel releases that I'm not sure how much
>> reproducibility you're ever going to get here. Are the differences
>> between Gentoo and RHEL any bigger than those, say, between RHEL and SuSE?
>
> The problem I've got with Gentoo is that it encourages homegrown builds
> with randomly-chosen options and compiler switches. That may help
> squeeze out a bit more speed but it does nothing for stability, nor
> reproduceability of results on other platforms which is what we really
> care about here.
>
> Another fairly big issue is that we need to know whether measurements we
> take in August are comparable to measurements we take in October, so a
> fairly stable platform is important. As you say, a fast-changing kernel
> would make it difficult to have any confidence about comparability over
> time. That would tend to make me vote for RHEL/Centos, where long-term
> stability is an explicit development goal. Debian stable might do too,
> though I'm not as clear about their update criteria as I am about Red Hat's.

Fully agreed (on the RH/CentOS and longterm stability stuff) debian is
even more stricter/conservatve than RH usually - they only have security
bugs and on very rare occation bugfixes for major issues(RH sometimes
adds new features and stuff in their point-releases).
Debian etch seems to be (very) slightly relaxing that - and in fact a
number of people were very surprised to see PostgreSQL updated from
8.1.8 (as shipped in etch) to 8.1.9 with the latest security release :-)
I would agree however that gentoo and also slackware are not "that"
attractive for this kind of work.

Stefan