[ILUG] Favourite flavours

[Brian Scanlan]

On Mon, 12 Jul 2004 in lists.ilug you wrote:
> 
> Now while I broady accept the argument that for hosting companies like 
> blacknight, it is essential to be able to put up a production box in <= no 
> time... the world is not a vax.. or rather a hosting company.

It sounded like he wanted a pair of servers for a production environment.  From
what I understand, Gentoo is fun and can be used in production if you're quite
comfortable with it and linux in general. I'm not sure if I'd reccomend it to a
newbie though - Debian and Fedora spring to mind first.

> I have nothing against Red Hat boxes 
> really, but, like I say, if you have the time and patience, you'll be hard 
> pushed not to see better performance from a arch specific optimised box.

What would you estimate the performance gain to be, and how long will the
servers be spending compiling each package (and updates to packages) to get
this gain? *And* how much of this performance gain is relevant to the task at
hand (i.e. a java application server, presumably running a pre-compiled jvm). I
don't think the "low hanging fruit" in this environment will be a lack of
processor specific binaries *should* a performance issue arise.

The only gentoo benchmark document I can find is this...
http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/performance.xml
...you'll find that most production servers don't spend their time in "load
time", and why they didn't compare a gentoo install with no optimisation to one
with arch specific optimisation? Compiling for a specific pentium
architecture/revision is hardly ever worth the time, unless you're running
specialised applications (i.e. not basic web serving and java application serving).

Brian.