Re: understanding postgres issues/bottlenecks

On Sun, 11 Jan 2009, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

> And you're probably in pretty good shape with Debian stable and the RHEL
> respins like CentOS.

No one is in good shape until they've done production-level load testing
on the system and have run the sort of "unplug it under load" tests that
Scott was praising. Since so many of the kernel bugs you might run into
are in device drivers, the subset of Debian/RHEL you're using is only as
stable as the worst supported driver running on your system.

> But you should be able to keep a "branded" server up for months, with
> the exception of applying security patches that require a reboot.

Right, this is why I only rely on Linux deployments using a name I trust:
Dell.

Returning to reality, the idea that there are brands you can buy that make
all your problems go away is rather optimistic. The number of "branded"
servers I've seen that are just nearly or completely worthless for
database use is rather depressing.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD