On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 03:39:23PM -0500, Jacob Yocom-Piatt wrote: > this thread is fucking stupid. > > consider that the majority of machines are horribly underutilized, even > in large organizations where some of the machines are under heavy load. > the reason that everyone here is so dismissive of benchmarks is that > they do not translate to real world results. people hyperventilate all > day about how software X runs Y% faster under various OSes but i rarely > if ever see a concrete expression of this e.g. i switched from openbsd > to linux and was able to offer the same level of service with half the > machines. > > part of the reason that one doesn't normally see concrete examples is > that there is far more to the 'performance' of a machine than just > benchmarks. > > - how does the cost of administration scale with machine count? OpenBSD sucks at this one. The fact that base isn't packaged is a *huge* pain if you run lots of it. As is the short support timeline.
> - with what frequency will OS-related issues cause a catastrophic > failure in a production environment? I've never seen any issues caused by the various linuxes we run, nor by OpenBSD w/r to this. > - is it easy to upgrade the machines? Again. OpenBSD really sucks at this one. Building from source is light years more difficult than 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade, or 'yum upgrade' or the like. And you've got to track updates for ports yourself, making those even more difficult to upgrade. > - if i don't regularly patch the machines will they get rooted? > OpenBSD is at least excellent at this one. But then, it'd want to be given how much of a pain it is to patch. And, it somewhat makes up for it with the fact that you're going to end up (in lots of cases), running non-base stuff, which will leave you somewhat vunerable. Maybe less vunerable than $linux, but I don't think the OS is the worst offender in most situations, by a long way. > once you start thinking about the answers to these questions you might > see how irrelevant most of this discussion has been to date. > I still wouldn't say these discussions are irrelavent. If my machines go faster, I don't have to upgrade my hardware as often, I don't have to use as many machines, and I don't have to deal with horrible database scaling issues as quickly. All of these things are useful and important. > cheers, > jake > > -- --
