[hobbit] Which OS is better for Hobbit server ?

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Wed, Oct 11, 2006 at 04:41:30PM -0500, T.J. Yang wrote:
> Solaris 10 sparc/intel  or linux ?

Pick whatever suits you best, I don't think there are any overwhelming
technical reasons for choosing one or the other.

At work I'm running Hobbit on Sun/SPARC hardware, with a Debian/Linux OS.
Linux was *much* better at running our old Big Brother installation*), so
that is what caused us to switch to Linux initially. When we moved to
Hobbit, I just kept linux on the boxes because it was the easiest thing
to do. (There was no compelling reason to go back to Solaris, and Linux
has all of the tools I need available, without having to download tons
of stuff from sunfreeware.com).


Regards,
Henrik


*) The reason why Linux is better for a BB installation is because
   the fork()/exec() system-call sequence used to launch a new program
   is incredibly slow on Solaris - that's why all of the real server
   programs for Solaris use threads. However, BB is written with shell
   scripts, so there is no way you can avoid lots of fork()/exec()
   calls with BB. And Linux just does that a lot faster than Solaris.
   At least this was true for Solaris 8, I haven't done any comparisons
   on later versions.