[Sussex] A funny thing happened on the way to the Net

[Mark Harrison (Groups)]

On Thu, 2005-12-15 at 11:08 -0600, Dominic Humphries wrote:
> 
> I must admit that sysadmin-ing a web host isn't something I know much 
> about, but
> I believe Debian packages are optimised for 386, while Gentoo
> optimizes for
> whatever CPU you actually have - possibly sysadmins are thinking that
> if they
> spend a fortune getting heavy-hitting CPUs, they might as well use a
> distro
> that makes maximum use of them?

Having been responsible for some really big websites in the past, I'm
very much with Steve's view - that proven reliability is a far bigger
concern than an extra 10% performance per webhead - scaling out websites
by adding more webheads into a load-balanced cluster is not tricky or
expensive, particularly compared to the "cost" (whether financial or
hassle or image) of having to deal with a couple of hours downtime
because something unproven goes wrong.

The old mantra of "scale out the front end, scale up the back end" still
has a lot going for it.


That having been said, I get the impression that Gentoo is relatively
well proven in the field now, and perhaps the decision is more along the
lines of:

"Both of these distributions will stay up, and will give adequate
performance. When push comes to shove, which am I / my team best able to
support if we do hit issues."

Certainly, a lot of my clients go RHES or Sun webheads for exactly that
reason - that we can get gold-edged service level guarantees from
companies that support these products.


Of course, the other issue is "who's making these decisions". My own
commercial website (www.yourpropertyexpert.com)  runs Linux / Apache /
PHP / MySQL, but I've no what distribution. I don't know, and don't
care, because that's the kind of decision I pay my ISP to make for me.
As far as I'm concerned, if Calum decides to go with Debian, or Fedora,
or Gentoo, or Aardvarkware, I really don't care - I'd rather he chose
something that he could support. (And with zero downtime in the last few
years, it would appear that he's made the decision correctly!)

Regards,

Mark