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Comment by Tomer | Hacker News Reader

Why not CentOS? what would you recommend then?

I saw that oracle are really emphasizing how their OS has much higher performance than linux I wondered if its correct or if their benchmarks are good: http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/performance-scalability/b... http://jp.sun.com/solutions/infra/eda/pdf/solaris-linux.pdf

So I wondered if i'm missing some tens of percents in performance by not choosing Sun Solaris...

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CentOS is binary compatible with RedHat, so it's for people who need the enterprise-ness of RedHat, but can't/won't run RedHat. An example I've heard is running RedHat in production for the support, but CentOS for devs and stating. The reason to run RedHat is usually something like needing to run Oracle or a number of other very complex software suites (the keyword is complex, not better or faster) that are only supported on specific platforms.

If you're running Oracle on Sun hardware, go for Solaris, sure, if for no other reason the support. If you're running "regular" open source software on generic hardware, just use Linux/BSD. There's nothing in Solaris that'd make Postgres faster than Linux or BSD on the same hardware.

What distribution do you recommend? (which is stable enough...) I wanted to choose CentOS because I know RedHat are saying they do lot of tests to their distribution before they release... so I wanted something that is fully tested and reliable.

It's been a while since I've had any responsibility over servers, but Debian has always treated me well.

Ubuntu which is derived from Debian is a good choice for servers, especially the LTS editions.

I'd be inclined to give it a try (I use and love Ubuntu on the desktop), but my impression is that Ubuntu is Debian packaged for the desktop... which isn't really relevant on a server. Debian is, OTOH, geared almost entirely for the server, already before Ubuntu came along.

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