Why use Linux?

There are many reasons. Some economic and TCO, some performance, some development, some stability. Well, that last one is interesting. We hear occasionally about systems stability, ability to withstand withering loads, ability to function and multifunction with ease. The machine that this blog has been running on, shared with multiple other websites, and other functions, is running Linux. Patches relevant for its functionality have been applied with none of the “you must reboot now” garbage that other OSes impose. And it has been up for 1 year today. `

1 >uptime
 12:24:43 up 365 days, 23:04, 15 users,  load average: 0.03, 0.13, 0.15

`

What’s interesting about this is that the previous reboots for the year before that have been due to kernel updates for security issues. I had a crash in mid 2006 attributable to a buggy yum process that started grabbing memory until the OOM killer started kicking in. OOM killer killed init somehow … and well … the machine was hung. Apart from that bug, this machine has been humming in constant operation, serving usually about 1 GB of content per day for ~3 years. 1 yum initiated crash, and a hardware (memory stick gone bad) crash. Not bad. Even though it is humming along nicely, we will start offloading some of its functionality to a different/newer server. This will free up space on this one for doing more of what it is good at. Which is running. Stably. FWIW: this is running Centos 4. This is a 1.6 GHz dual opteron (242) system with 4 GB ram and a little disk (0.6TB). The new server will be a JackRabbit. We need the power.