*BSD News Article 66366


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From: mandtbac@news.abo.fi (Mats Andtbacka)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: FreeBSD vs Linux
Followup-To: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.advocacy
Date: 17 Apr 1996 13:04:26 GMT
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The Tooth Is Out There, in <4ksfst$459@raffles.technet.sg>:
>Is there any recent comparisons on which one is better suited to be a server 
>configuration?

even that comparison sounds near-impossible. what other machines are
there on that net, what will it be serving to what OS'es, what other
servers are there and what are they running? what are the admins more
experienced with, and/or what do they happen to like better?

> Can anyone post any information on server uptimes and 
>downtimes.

for both Linux and FreeBSD, hardware concerns are probably what
determines reliability more than kernel code quality. they're both
good enough that if they go down, odds are it's something else that's
gone haywire.

i know of Linux boxen that have stayed up more than a year non-stop.
i'd be surprised if the FreeBSD record was significantly lower, or
higher; if higher, i wouldn't off-hand credit it to the OS alone,
since you need an almost unusually stable environment to keep
_anything_ up much longer than that anyway.

> Which server can stay online longest without rebooting?

on an Intel-architecture box, due to a jiffy counter overflowing, it's
probably a good idea to reboot Linux once a year. ;-) if that's too
often for you, use a DEC Alpha box, it's got an unsigned 64-bit jiffy
counter, which gets incremented every millisecond - work it out
yourself. ;-) ;-)

seriously, the answer to this depends far more on what you do with the
box and how you do it, than anything much else. with decent hardware,
neither OS ought to give you headaches.

> How are they compared to SUN OS or HP-UX interms of uptimes?

i have trouble imagining either of those getting very much longer
uptimes than years. longer, possibly, because they're both significant
enough investments that you'd be interested in keeping them happily
running along, but running them for very many years nonstop would land
you with outdated hardware and system software sort of needlessly.

(oh, and your .sig is oversize. i know, in advocacy groups maybe
that's the least sin you can commit, but it's really *badly*
oversize.)
-- 
 "look on the bright side, is suicide"     -- Nirvana