On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 2:21 AM, Domas Mituzas <[email protected]>wrote:
> George,
>
> > Eventually, supportability and bugfixes for newer versions surpass
> > those for
> > older versions.
>
> True, though we don't hit bugs too much in 4.0, it is somewhat
> rocksolid for us.
> Eventually not going for 5.4 will be bad situation (once innodb plugin
> 1.0.3 features get merged in, e.g. fast index management is awesome :)
>
> > Among other things, if you wait too long between refreshes, you run
> > the risk
> > that it's too hard to roll the next upgrade, because of lack of
> > experience
> > and preparation with upgrading.
>
> Well, there's that with proprietary/legacy internal projects. We
> actually run opensource project which works both on 4.0 and on 6.0.
> I did testing with 5.0, 5.1, 5.4 - so we kind of know what steps are
> needed to upgrade our farm from application side.
> We also know what is needed from DBA side - and that is a bit of work.
>
> > Upgrades should be regular and expected. Frequent is probably a
> > mistake,
> > barring active bugs, but trying to freeze anything in time works
> > poorly over
> > 5 year timespans. You eventually end up with hardware that's
> > obsolete to
> > the point of unreliability, software that's obsolete to the point of
> > unreliability, etc.
>
> Think of our 4.0.40 as less than two year old product. We have
> features people don't have in 5.0 ;-) It is not that bad then!
> Anyway, software, especially infrastructure one, gets obsolete way
> later, unless really interesting developments happen.
>
> Cheers,
> Domas
I appreciate what you're saying, but I've been the person who had to clean
up several large environments (much larger than WMF) after they let software
get too old, and it was very much not pretty.
If you're not keeping currentish and testing new stuff, you miss that you
can't buy hardware to support that OS version anymore. ("What do you mean,
this Linux kernel can't deal with hyperthreading CPUs and won't boot?")
If you're not keeping currentish and testing new stuff, you miss that the
easy upgrade to the next version doesn't work anymore. (Been there, done
that with Mediawiki... and Oracle, and RHEL6, and FreeBSD, and Solaris, and
Websphere and Weblogic and Java and Apache and ...)
If you're not keeping currentish and testing new stuff, you're missing
security patches which nobody remembers to backport more than one rev of the
OS / DB / apps (in this case, WMF is developing the big app and Domas'
connection to the DB helps avoid that, but most places have none of these
covered).
Having spent several years of my life at various companies pulling them
forwards onto newer supportable OSes and hardware and app versions the hard
way, I strongly recommend staying more current on EVERYTHING...
It's industry best practice. Not everyone is doing it, obviously, but it is
a best practice.
Think of this as a subtle trap, that is slowly engulfing you. Getting out
of it is easy at first, and eventually becomes unbearably painful around
year 4 or 5.
--
-george william herbert
[email protected]
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