Well I am kind of stuck using OpenSuse. Not a bad distro and is the one
we use in our office for production work.
I like CentOS myself for database work and tend to use that for test
systems here since I manage them myself.
I was more wondering if someone had made a Postgres centric distro yet.
Sort of FreeNAS, OpenFiler, or what ever the Asterisk distro is called
these days.
Seems like you could build a nice little distro that was database
centric. Maybe use FreeBSD, Solaris, or Centos as the base.
Sort of a plug and play solution.
I do wonder just how well Solaris plus ZFS would work for a Postgres server.
I am lucky that my database is only several hundred thousands records
and only has a few dozen users hitting it.
It ran for the longest time on just a 400 MHZ PII and is now running
under CentOS on a whopping 600Mhz PIII with all of 256 mb of ram.
It is going to finally move to a real server with dual Xeons and a gig
of ram. That should keep it happy for a decade or two. Did I mention
that I love the performance of Postgres and Linux?
Greg Smith wrote:
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@xxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD
