Mike MacCana wrote:
I generally find people complaining about RH being unstable see an app
failing under RH that works well with another distro and wonder what's
wrong.
These are bugs in those apps, that need to be, and are, fixed in those
apps. It is a good thing they are exposed (it certainly helps the
distros that follow), but can cause some inconvenience.
I'll defend and elaborate on my posting. I find that some apps on
RH 9 that were perfectly stable on RH 8.0, RH 7.3 and earlier are
unstable under heavy load on RH 9. I think it is something to do
with the threading libraries, it doesn't appear to be the apps.
Apache 2.0 on RH 8.0 was quite stable. Exactly the same version
of apache on RH 9 appears to be unstable under heavy load. Ditto
for MySQL and OpenLDAP. The primary difference appears to be that
under 8.0 and 7.3 these apps run as many separate processes. In
9 they appear to run as a single process (cf: difference between
running pstree on 9 vs 7.3 with mysqld for example).
All other apps including desktop stuff appears to be just as stable
and perhaps somewhat faster on 9 vs 8.0 or 7.3.
I haven't been able to nail down the problem. I think it's got to
do with the new threading libraries on RH 9. I think it might be
somewhere in glibc rather than in the application (eg: why does
exactly the same code, back-ported to 7.3, on exactly the same
hardware, run much more stably than it did on RH 9). It only happens
under heavy load. I have to confess I don't have enough information
to even file a report on bugzilla.redhat.com, and the amount of
spare time I have to dedicate to this issue is fairly small at
the moment.
The main issues certainly appear to be apache, mysqld and openldap,
hence my reply to the initial posting which asked whether apache
2.0 on RedHat 9 was stable. My opinion is that it is not. I
am about 90% certain it's a distro/library problem, not an application
problem.
--
Del
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