Re: Best suiting OS

On Thu, 1 Oct 2009, S Arvind wrote:

> 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.

Generally the fastest Linux distribution is whichever one is built using
the most recent Linux kernel. The downside of that is that the latest
kernel versions are likely to have nasty bugs in them.

RedHat and CentOS are both based on the 2.6.18 kernel, with some pieces of
later ones patched in there too. That's pretty old at this point. What I
do on a lot of systems is install RHEL/CentOS, then compile my own kernel
starting with the same options RedHat did and use that one. Then I can
adjust exactly how close I am to the latest Linux kernel while still
getting the benefit of the stable package set the rest of the distribution
offers. Right now I'm using 2.6.30 on a few such systems, that's one rev
back from current (2.6.31 is the latest stable kernel release but it's
still scary new).

The standard kernel on current Ubuntu systems right now is based on
2.6.28, that performs pretty well too.

If what you want is optimized speed and you don't care about any other
trade-off, Gentoo Linux is probably what you want. You better make sure
you have considerable Linux support expertise available for your project
though. That's probably true of any high-performance setup though. Many
of the ways you can make a database system faster are complicated to setup
and require more work to keep going than if you just settled for the
slower but more popular implementation.

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