Hello everyone. I'll keep it short and sweet. All bias aside, which Linux distro has been proven optimal, e.g. lowest overhead, etc., for networking purposes? Reason I ask is, I built a RedHat 9.0 Samba server with minimal packages installed on an old Compaq Presario at home and it appears to be functioning optimally but I wanted to be enlightened if I'm off base. I've mainly worked with RedHat, Knoppix, and several lesser mainstream distros and RedHat has always "appeared" to function efficiently but I've never dug into the performance monitoring aspect to prove that observation. Thanks in advance for your insight.

I think Suse 9.0 has the other distro's beaten for networking right now. Why?

Just pull up yast, click on the Net Services tab and you have gui configs for the following Servers and clients...

DHCP, HTTP, DNS, Kerbose, Ldap, NFS, NIS, NTP, Samba, and TFTP...

No scripts to edit, auto configuring and suggesting along with searching for current hosts on your personal network. Takes less than 5 minutes to have 4 computers sharing files and printers with each other

That's like asking, "What is the better beer for drinking?" You are going to get such a diverse set of answers it'll make your head spin and make the question more of a hinderance than a help.

All *nix distro's were made for networking so to ask which one is "optimal" really isn't going to help. To compound the problem, you need to ask yourself what you mean by optimal... do you mean how much traffic a firewall can process? Do you mean the ease of administration? Do you mean contains the most robust set of servers?

The serious answer to your question is that whatever distro you pick, will be just fine. You will get MORE "optimal" performance by choosing "optimal" software to sit on top of your server... i.e. picking a fast webserver. Also, Hardware will have a more dramatic effect on "optimal" performance than the distro will. Buy some good cards, cabling and switches will give you better performance than fine-tuning your distro.

Just my 2 cents. And for the record... whenever someone asks me what distro to choose, I tell them whatever distro *I* am working on at that moment. Why? Because *I* am the one that has to support them. ;-)