[Zope] Linux vs. UNIX vs. BSD

[sean.upton@uniontrib.com]

I'll second support for use of Debian.  We use it in a lot of production
tasks on a bunch of servers and for development workstations.  That said,
with some of our new boxes, we are using Debian, but compiling from source
RedHat enterprise kernels (easier than patching stock kernel) to get better
hardware monitoring, and more importantly, to get the O2 scheduler, which
does have some crude CPU affinity support.  I believe this is one area where
Linux has been a bit behind some other Unix varieties.

Though we haven't used it yet, as I understand it, CPU affinity is important
to Python performance on SMP machines.   I expect that we will write or find
a simple user-space utility utilizing the new system calls to bind a group
of processes to a single CPU.  I think, in theory, this will allow us to
successfully run two Zope instances on an inexpensive 2CPU machine, each
instance bound to a respective CPU.

Sean

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Renfro [mailto:renfro@tntech.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, August 20, 2002 8:19 AM
To: Peter Bengtsson
Cc: zope@zope.org
Subject: Re: [Zope] Linux vs. UNIX vs. BSD


On Tue, Aug 20, 2002 at 10:55:14AM +0100, Peter Bengtsson wrote:

> For dev and desktop I personally prefer Mandrake, but what I like
> becomes irrelevant when it's time to set up a serious server for
> production use.

I'm compelled to put in my two cents for Debian GNU/Linux now:

- performance should be identical to any other Linux distribution on
  the same hardware.

- configurability should also be identical, or exceeding other
  distributions. There's no overarching GUI configurator, but a
  combination between good policy on how packages are organized and
  tools never overriding your own settings without substantial
  warnings and chances to back out is nice.

- not sure what you mean by "ease of use" and "lack of hacks". Most
  all common tasks (adding/deleting users, etc. ) already have scripts
  to handle them. Debian doesn't do much GUI integration, so this may
  count against your ease of use. On the other hand, I can administer
  a Debian server with a modem-enabled Palm.

- RDBMS integration is there: packages already built for the usual
  Unix SQL servers.

- Backup should be comparable to any other Unix. There's tar, dump,
  cpio, and afio for low-level tools (don't just use cat
  /dev/hdwhatever, please). There's tob, taper, afbackup, amanda and
  others for high-level tools. You can of course always pay for BRU,
  Veritas, or whatever normally runs on Linux.

- ZEO should be a non-issue, as well. If you can get it running
  anywhere, you shouldn't have any extra difficulties.

Downsides include the historically slow release cycle (Zope went from
2.1.6 to 2.5.1 during the last Debian stable release), which can be
somewhat mitigated by building your own packages, or doing what lots
of people do: building it from source in /usr/local. One could always
install something other than the "stable" release of Debian on a
server, but I'd not recommend it for the inexperienced (it'll be
similar to running some other Linux distribution's normal
releases). Debian's stable releases are very, very stable, and if your
server hardware is supported, they're about trivially maintainable.

-- 
Mike Renfro  / R&D Engineer, Center for Manufacturing Research,
931 372-3601 / Tennessee Technological University -- renfro@tntech.edu

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