Re: Probably been asked a hundred times before.

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@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD
>