Re: Best Linux Distribution

I think the filesystem you choose depends what you are looking for.
Ext3 is by far the most tested and most stable out the file systems
available. It is basically just ext2 with journalling stuck on top
(and a few other niceities). XFS may well be faster but is perhaps not
so well tested or as stable. My choise for stability would be ext3 and
for speed would be xfs.

As for the OS, it probably doesn't make much difference. My personal
choice though is gentoo. My reasons are.

1. The postgres server is compiled with optimised gcc flags.
2. Gentoo have many different versions of postgres available and is
easy to upgrade /change between versions. Looking at the versions
available now they have from
7.3.6 to 8.0. (8.0 is still marked as testing)

Regards,

Abdul-Wahid

On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 11:34:31 +0100 (CET), Marco Colombo
<pgsql(at)esiway(dot)net> wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Jan 2005, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>
> > Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
> >
> >> No difference whatsoever from PostgreSQL's point of view. Use whichever
> >> distribution is easiest for you to administer. After all, there's no
> >> point installing Postgres on a machine you don't know how to maintain
> >> or tune :)
> >>
> > Actually there is a difference from PostgreSQL's point of view :)
> > Namely in filesystems. The default filesystem on whitebox, RHEL and
> > Fedora is EXT3 which really isn't that great.
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> Is there any evidence of the above claim? I've seen a link to a l-k
> bug report about ext3, but apparently it was totally unconfirmed
> (and a single bug does not mean a FS is not good - I remember XFS
> being hammered heavily before being accepted into Linux).
>
> I'm using ext3 cause all other FSes are simple add-ons in linux.
> All of them struggled a lot before being able to meet linux high
> quality standards and being accepted into mainstream. Ext3 was there
> from the start. Of course that doesn't mean it fits PostgreSQL needs
> better than other FSes.
>
> .TM.
> --
> ____/ ____/ /
> / / / Marco Colombo
> ___/ ___ / / Technical Manager
> / / / ESI s.r.l.
> _____/ _____/ _/ Colombo(at)ESI(dot)it
>
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