I guess I'll just drop my two cents in to disagree as far as AMD64
Gentoo not being production worthy. I have had a very pleasant
experience running my GX-28 server in production for 7 months now
without a single problem. Since the server was installed, it has had
100% uptime, except for 3 reboots for kernel upgrades. The price for
the server was $2,600 and I have been able to use it to completely
replace 3 different Dell dual 1GHz Xeon servers with it that were bought
for far more than this one. During testing I kept added apps from the
other servers and the fully loaded AMD server's performance (I'm
comparing total CPU usage %) was better than any of the Dell's were with
far fewer apps install. Something else to mention is that the Dell's
had SCSI 320 with 4 Seagate Cheetahs each and a hardware raid controller
while the AMD server is SATA with a hardware raid controller. I realize
that's a faulty comparison because the Dell's had a combined 2 GHz each
while the AMD server has dual 246 opterons, but my real point is just
that in my experience (so far) everything has been as stable as the
Intel servers. Another thing I noticed is that the AMD server produces
FAR less heat than the Intel servers and is also quieter. However for
the first thirty seconds when the server boots up it is LOUD, but the
the fans slow down and then eventually turn off (I have a way too big AC
unit dedicated to my clean room/server closet). Also speaking purely of
personal preference, I find that Gentoo's portage is a much more
efficient in managing a business environment where we are managing a
handful of linux machines, all of which are Gentoo. What I have been
doing is every time a PC needs to be replaced, I have been switching it
from WinTel to an AMD64 Gentoo box, with the exception of my 2
Engineering and drafting staff which I am stuck with Windows because I
haven't found a suitable replacement for AutoCad or SAP2000. The idea
is to have our office running all AMD Gentoo at some point in the near
future. So far I have 5 AMD Gentoo boxes (including the server), and 5
WinTel workstations including the 2 Eingineering and drafting ones. If
anyone else is doing a migration like this I'd love to share notes.
Frank Perez
If you're running a commercial server I wouldn't go anywhere near amd64
unless it is just running a small set of core apps (like apache) and you
expect to benefit from the improved performance. On the other hand, if
you're deploying a non-saturated general-purpose server you really should
be going with something more stable (probably debian).
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