[CentOS] Statistics on stability?

Chris Mauritz chrism at imntv.com
Mon Jul 24 15:56:44 UTC 2006


Eduardo Grosclaude wrote:
>
>
> On 7/24/06, *Chris Mauritz* <chrism at imntv.com 
> <mailto:chrism at imntv.com>> wrote:
>
>     Jim Perrin wrote:
>     > On 7/24/06, Eduardo Grosclaude <eduardo.grosclaude at gmail.com
>     <mailto:eduardo.grosclaude at gmail.com>> wrote:
>     >> Hello,
>     >>  I want to compare CentOS to Fedora and other distros on a
>     >> stability/network-dependance basis. Where should I look for some
>     >> published
>     >> statistics on updates? I mean probably megabytes per week (or
>     whichever
>     >> units, of published updates over time), per distro.
>     >>  Thank you in advance
>     >
>     > http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/65/CentOS_4.2.pdf
>     > http://www.redhat.com/rhel/migrate/whichlinux/  (CentOS is built
>     from
>     > the freely available RHEL source rpms, so arguements for RHEL on
>     this
>     > page also apply to CentOS, except for support and pricetag.)
>
>     I have a number of CentOS machines that have been up 24/7 in
>     datacenter
>     environments for years and were only rebooted on occasion as a
>     result of
>     security-related kernel upgrades (which would affect any linux
>     distro).
>     I can't recall EVER having uptime or network-related issues on ANY
>     live
>     CentOS server that wasn't the direct result of a hardware failure.  It
>     just works...and works...and works.  :)  The key is to beat up on any
>     new hardware in a test environment first to make sure that you don't
>     have any incompatible hardware bits (which hasn't bitten me often).
>
> Thank you for your point, on which I wholly agree, but I was taking 
> "stability" as "a measure of velocity in change" of a system's 
> components-- here reflected in a shorter or longer life cycle for each 
> version. Please correct me if I am wrong, I may be misusing the word 
> (I am heading right to Wikipedia in a minute! :) ).
> We all want CentOS as a server system because of its "stability" which 
> -at least for me- means few, controlled changes over an extended 
> lifetime. As to the network-dependance problem, I was thinking of the 
> "gee, I will really need a bandwidth here to cope with updates" 
> feeling suggested, for instance, by Fedora.

Ah, in that case, I think the answer is "it depends".  :-)  Periodic 
updates and updates from one minor release to the next seem to use only 
a small amount of bandwidth and involve a small number of packages.  It 
is approximately the same as you would experience with RedHat Enterprise 
Linux, which is the basis for CentOS.  Compared to Fedora, the changes 
are significantly less often (except for security fixes) and probably a 
lot less bandwidth requirements (but I do not currently use Fedora so I 
am not positive about this part).

I hope that helps.

Cheers,

Chris




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