3 ms·

Oh yea, one really important thing to remember here is that because I work in an HPC environment, performance is a serious consideration, and in many cases is t

by jmomo 14y ago

Oh yea, one really important thing to remember here is that because I work in an HPC environment, performance is a serious consideration, and in many cases is the determining factor when it comes to OS selection. The ANCIENT old kernels and software in CentOS are a significant problem in some cases, and a benefit in others. We are doing a lot of infiniband, 10Gig networking (with full multi-interface throughput for days at a time), huge filesystems, and crazy other stuff that a regular web server would not do. Notably, almost all of our web servers have gone Ubuntu for ease of management, since the web guy likes Ubuntu. But we don't use Ubuntu for their commercial support. My experience there, in the past, has not been good. We ultimately support ourselves.

SEJeff 14y ago
All of those things you speak of are not things a web server should do, they are things a HPC server / compute node does. I'll have to agree with @davidr that Ubuntu is very painful for those types of environments. Ubuntu + Infiniband? Ask Canonical how many people they have working on Infiniband... I dare you :) The answer will be exactly 0. Canonical's focus is on phones, tablets, and desktops. Mark simply does not take the server as a serious use case. Clearly redhat doesn't know what they are doing, they've only built the first billion dollar purely open source company. Since RedHat employs a very very large number of upstream kernel.org Linux kernel hackers, don't you think that maybe, just maybe they backport some of those newer features into their old stable kernels? As one of the parents alluded to (open vswitch and namespacing support), yet again the answer is yes. Pure Debian isn't bad granted, but it simply doesn't compare to Redhat. I just don't see them as the same league. Canonical is a sales organization parading (poorly) as an engineering organization. However, they have done absolutely wonderful things for marketing Linux before Android came out so they do deserve respect where it is do. What do I know, I've only worked in large multithousand node environments my entire career </snark>

by jmomo 14y ago

SEJeff 14y ago

All of those things you speak of are not things a web server should do, they are things a HPC server / compute node does. I'll have to agree with @davidr that Ubuntu is very painful for those types of environments. Ubuntu + Infiniband? Ask Canonical how many people they have working on Infiniband... I dare you :) The answer will be exactly 0. Canonical's focus is on phones, tablets, and desktops. Mark simply does not take the server as a serious use case. Clearly redhat doesn't know what they are doing, they've only built the first billion dollar purely open source company. Since RedHat employs a very very large number of upstream kernel.org Linux kernel hackers, don't you think that maybe, just maybe they backport some of those newer features into their old stable kernels? As one of the parents alluded to (open vswitch and namespacing support), yet again the answer is yes. Pure Debian isn't bad granted, but it simply doesn't compare to Redhat. I just don't see them as the same league. Canonical is a sales organization parading (poorly) as an engineering organization. However, they have done absolutely wonderful things for marketing Linux before Android came out so they do deserve respect where it is do. What do I know, I've only worked in large multithousand node environments my entire career </snark>