Re: Probably been asked a hundred times before.

On Tue, 24 Jun 2008, David Siebert wrote:

> Which disto is best for running a Postgres server?

You didn't define what best means for you.

If you want to always want to stay current with new releases, the
RedHat/Fedora packages available at http://www.postgresql.org/download are
on average the most up to date. I personally avoid Fedora because the
support lifetime is so short, and on non-production servers I'll use
CentOS instead of the official RedHat.

If you want something popular so that you will likely be able to find
support help if you run into issues, again a RHEL/Fedora system is good
for that, with Ubuntu being another increasingly mainstream choice.

Should running multiple databases instances at once, having easy scripts
to upgrade between versions, and being able to easily install additional
software be important goals, a Debian or Ubuntu system has some nice
features. The main thing to watch for is that the Ubuntu desktop system
is optimized a bit oddly for database use.

If you'd like a more stable system with powerful filesystem and
OS-debugging tools, and don't mind having a less popular system with less
open-source gadgets tacked on, consider Solaris or FreeBSD.

If performance is your priority, what will work best really depends on
what hardware you intend to deploy on. It's possible to get a good
high-performance setup out of any of these, it's just a matter of matching
the appropriate supported hardware. There are some weird issues with
really recent Linux kernels and PostgreSQL so you need to be careful
there. I've put some suggestions about what works well and badly for me
at
http://notemagnet.blogspot.com/2008/05/pgbench-suffering-with-linux-2623-2626.html
you might find interesting.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD