Linux as a server which one??
 

Hi all
I was just wondering the difference between a Linux distribution comparing to the other ones.

lets say I have 1Mpbs internet connection and only one file with size 1M the processor is 4G
and about 1 million user want to download it at the same time :)

now it is the time to choose the OS does it differs if I installed :
Slackware ,
Debian ,
Ubuntu ,
Solaris
,............ ??????
and why ???

Thanks a lot in advance.

It won't make any difference to performance in your example.
The usual differences between server distros are stability, support and the default tool set ... basically the same as regular distros.

So are you asking which distro would handle such a hypothetical load? Depends on how they're downloading it? HTTP? NFS? FTP? SFTP? All have their pluses and minuses.
TBH, the only real difference is down to which tools you prefer and whether your focus is on stability or bleeding edge functions.
Being that all versions of Linux have access to pretty much all the same software, it's down to how that software is deployed. Personally, for instance, I like the way Debian does its Apache2 setup. I also like APT, although I use RPM/YUM a lot these days too.
I used to like SuSE, but I find it tries too hard to be all things to all men these days.
I don't like such distros as Mandriva, PCLinuxOS and such, but I do like Ubuntu... go figure.

If it was me... I'd make my choice between Debian and CentOS

Also, Solaris isn't Linux.

a lot of web servers use centos as the OS it is a very light and fast and stable OS i think you should run that on your server

go for redhat linux

^
CentOS is RedHat, without the huge licensing fees

We (my collegue and I) have a webhosting company in the Netherlands and use Debian as OS, to our great satisfaction. Worth mentioning is that there are 200+ websites hosted with us and some of them get over 40.000 unique hits a day, others are media servers used to provide content download (enterprise proprietary, not torrent :p).

IMHO, I'd go with Debian

lets say they have the same server programs and the file is FTP or anything u want ??
but the question will the server crash or the OS will handle the problem and stop some for downloading till the downloaders finish

I'd use Debian on a server and slackware on a desktop/laptop, ubuntu for beginners and... What else? :rolleyes: ;)

The trouble with this sort of question is that it rapidly turns into a "my distro is best" war. These thing do not end. Can those people who want to suggest a distro also explain why they think their suggestion is particularly good for the use example in the first post? Why would Debian or Redhat or CentOS be particularly good at handling high-loads? I suspect they are not - it's the actual deployment that will count... in that regard, we really want to see if there are distros which are quick to deploy for the clients needs - and, as another poster has commented, that depends an what the needs (i.e. connection) are.

Personally, I think OP needs a better question: it is not sufficient to distinguish different distros.
The question af what does distinguish different distros has already been addressed.

However - thas cannot be a new question. So, I went hunting for server comparisons. I found:

http://www.serverwatch.com/stypes/compare/
... not tried it. Can someone check it out and comment? Looks a bit like thu distro choosers.


You can find technical comparisons from vendors - Redhat and Novell below
https://www.redhat.com/rhel/server/compare/
http://www.novell.com/products/server/compare.html
... these are all freedom minded proffessionals, we can rely on them to be dispassionate and impartial in their comparisons, surely?

Most comparisons lump all linuxes together:
http://www.singlehop.com/dedicated-s...ed-servers.php

Or we get magazine style fluffy articles:
http://bashton.com/linux-distribution-comparison/

I still have not found anything to show that there is a substantial difference between gnu/linux server distributions.

thanks simon..these links are really helpful...

I cannot be sure whether this has any chance whatsoever of helping the OP, but

lets also assume that the OS is 'perfect' and the speed is only constrained by the '1 Mbps connection' (and if its any of the ADSL-type technologies, upload speed is likely to be, say, 1/3 of the quoted speed, which will make things much worse). Lets also assume, slightly unrealistically, that all of these people turn up at once and try to get at the content:

It is unclear what you mean by 'the processor is 4G'; any realistic interpretation I can put on that makes it an irrelevant or misleading detail.

You want to push 1million x 1 megabyte through a 1megabit link (as discussed earlier, that is unlikely to be correct). That's 8 million seconds. Or 133333.3 minutes. Or 2222.2 Hours. Or 92.59 days.

Well over a quarter of a year. Now, while you can argue that the average wait is only half that, its still a bit ridiculous, isn't it?

The important point is that this is rubbish and the OS hasn't made it so. Its the amount of data through the link and the OS isn't doing anything to make it worse, so selecting a different version of Linux isn't, in this case, worthwhile.

hi all
I didn't mean to put constrains on the server I only meant to make all like each other :)
u can assume what u want 1Gpbs internet connection,.......................

I saw a voting on the best dist for a server and I found slackware and Debian the tops so I thought that the OS can mange some cases and try to solve it or react to make the performance better ,....................

centos is actually the best and is use by google, facebook and other huge web sites

Solaris isn't Linux. If you want that it's an option, but know what you're getting into.

As far as the Linux distributions go, I like CentOS(Redhat) and Debian for server use. They tend to be stable and reliable for a significant amount of time and are timely with security updates.

I wouldn't consider ubuntu for a server (even the server version) it brings nothing to the table that debian doesn't already provide, although it's a good system for desktops.

Slackware is fine for servers, but if you have to maintain a lot of systems I find it takes more work to keep up to date than debian or centos. I've run a lot of servers off slack in the past though and found it to be a stable tried and true os.

There aren't going to be significant performance differences between the various flavors of linux. You'll bottleneck your hardware (disk io especially) and often times your client daemons (like apache and mysql if you don't tweak them some) long before you bottleneck at the OS level.

In the end though it all comes down to opinion and what you're most comfortable admining. Pick a single distribution for all your hosting and stick with it to keep things simple.