Tom Lane wrote: > Greg Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> On Wed, 25 Jul 2007, Tom Lane wrote: >>> Gentoo always leaves me wondering exactly what I'm running today, >>> and I think reproducibility is an important attribute for a benchmarking >>> machine. > >> At this point, there's enough performance variations even between >> individual Linux kernel releases that I'm not sure how much >> reproducibility you're ever going to get here. Are the differences >> between Gentoo and RHEL any bigger than those, say, between RHEL and SuSE? > > The problem I've got with Gentoo is that it encourages homegrown builds > with randomly-chosen options and compiler switches. That may help > squeeze out a bit more speed but it does nothing for stability, nor > reproduceability of results on other platforms which is what we really > care about here. > > Another fairly big issue is that we need to know whether measurements we > take in August are comparable to measurements we take in October, so a > fairly stable platform is important. As you say, a fast-changing kernel > would make it difficult to have any confidence about comparability over > time. That would tend to make me vote for RHEL/Centos, where long-term > stability is an explicit development goal. Debian stable might do too, > though I'm not as clear about their update criteria as I am about Red Hat's.
Fully agreed (on the RH/CentOS and longterm stability stuff) debian is even more stricter/conservatve than RH usually - they only have security bugs and on very rare occation bugfixes for major issues(RH sometimes adds new features and stuff in their point-releases). Debian etch seems to be (very) slightly relaxing that - and in fact a number of people were very surprised to see PostgreSQL updated from 8.1.8 (as shipped in etch) to 8.1.9 with the latest security release :-) I would agree however that gentoo and also slackware are not "that" attractive for this kind of work. Stefan ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 7: You can help support the PostgreSQL project by donating at http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate