Re: Best suiting OS

S Arvind wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> What is the best Linux flavor for server which runs postgres
> alone. The postgres must handle greater number of database around
> 200+. Performance on speed is the vital factor.
> Is it FreeBSD, CentOS, Fedora, Redhat xxx??
>
> -Arvind S
We use Arch Linux and love it. It does not have "versions" - you just
keep updating your install and never have to do a major version
upgrade. It is a bare bones distribution with excellent package
management and repositories, virtually no distribution cruft, and a
fantastic community/wiki/forum.

As a warning no one offers support for Arch that I know of and the
packages are generally very current with the latest which is both a good
and bad thing. For a production environment you have to be very careful
about when you do upgrades and preferably can test upgrades on QA
machines before running on production. You also want to make sure and
exclude postgresql from updates so that it doesn't do something like
pull down 8.4 over an 8.3.x installation without you being backed up and
ready to restore. PostgreSQL is currently at 8.4.1 in their repositories.

With that disclaimer out of the way it is my favorite Linux distribution
and I am running it on a couple dozens servers at the moment ranging
from puny app servers to 8 core, 32GB+ RAM, 30-40 disk database
servers. If you are comfortable with Linux it is worth checking out (on
your personal machine or QA environment first). I've run dozens of
distributions and this works well for us (a startup with nontrivial
Linux experience). I imagine at a larger company it definitely would
not be an option.

Joe Uhl