>>be aware that you're in for a lot of reading.
Is that an understatement?
Does either perform better than the other on dual processors? Is mod_perl 1.0 the best choice?
Thanks,
Rod
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FreeBSD 4.9 (latest stable) scales excellently, and the 5.x series promises to tune many aspects, but isn't considered stable yet.
The Linux kernel had serious problems on SMP systems up to the version 2.4 series. 2.4 does well all-around, though suffers under very high loads. 2.6 catches up with FreeBSD in all regards and can basically be considered to be "playing with the big boys", a bit better here a bit worse there, but it's definitely a serious contender in all areas. Note that 2.6 is not available as a package in Debian stable; however, installing a 2.6 kernel is not an issue at all, anway, you just follow standard procedures..
A base install for both systems is pretty easy to accomplish (driver issues aside, of course..), and additional software isn't hard to install either, but actual administration does require reading. However, most of your effort at first will be learning where and how to find documentation; the learning curve is steep, but rapidly flattens once you get the big picture of the system and grok the inherent consistency of most things Unix.
And since you've done some Perl programming, you'll have at least vaguely heard of a number of Unix concepts, too, so that might ease the initial hurdle.
Makeshifts last the longest.
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Both Linux and FreeBSD have good SMP support. I haven't personally seen benchmarks for them on SMP, though. Either one is an excelent choice.
Note that MySQL doesn't like the way FreeBSD does multi-threading. You'll be OK on low-traffic sites, but high-traffic ones can get bogged down fast (as Perl Monks often does).
Definately go with mod_perl 1 unless you have specific requiments that need mod_perl2. Even then, I would fight to hold off on mod_perl2 for a while. Just be sure the developers read the mod_perl2 migration docs, as they should probably code with the idea twards migrating later.
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: () { :|:& };:
Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated
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[d/l] |
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Thank you for the advice. MySQL isn't an issue. We're running the db on a seperate box behind the firewall.
Actually, that's what started this current migration. The old machine used to run MySQL and the search scripts, but was getting overloaded, so we added a new dedicated db server and redeployed the old box, switching to Apache to get output compression, persistent db connections and so forth.
Interestingly, I benchmarked MySQL (4.016, I think) on FreeBSD on the new machine (dual 2.8Mhz P4s) versus Windows 2003. Who'd have thunk? On loading 2.5 million records, Windows 2003 was faster by a fair margin. The same was true for W2K as it was either about the same or slower than FreeBSD. As I recall, the reasons were largely due to hyperthreading on the P4 as W2K3 sees 2 CPUs for each processor along with other performance improvements in W2K3.
I've got the FreeBSD 4.9 install disks, so I'll give it a go. I appreciate the porting tips. We're trying to keep the code as generic as possible so that it can also run in a standard perl environment, so we should be ok there, but will take a hard look at the migration docs.
Rod
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