I always did optimizations on the servers i have installed, configured, managed. „During the ages” I was once a big Gentoo fan. That was a hell of optimization!!! BUUUT, when you think about the time to install a server….
Nowadays the most popular distros, for servers, are, let’s face it, CentOS(main reason is because it’s based on RHEL) and Ubuntu. When you ask me what to install on a server i say: what you want, i prefer Centos 5.x, Ubuntu 8.04.x LTS and Debian 5.x. Between Debian and Ubuntu I prefer right now Debian, maybe because it’s lighter. By the way, don’t even try to ask about Fedora, Fedora was never designed for servers, it’s development cycle just not helps for installing on long term services servers.
So i prefer .deb based distros because .deb installing is definitely faster than .rpm. So, there is what i did to prove myself: I installed in a virtual machine first CentOS, then Debian. On both systems only “Base” OS was installed, no special partitioning, no special settings, both having the same amount of RAM and CPU cores. After the base install i runned a system update, yum update on Centos and apt-get dist-upgrade on Debian and then installed apache, php, mysql. I even forgot to do a chkconfig for mysql on CentOS.
I have only one conclusion: “Time is money!” At least based on the length of the movies 
(no frames were inserted or removed)
CentOS: clip also available on blip.tv
Debian: clip also available on blip.tv
I agree! I definitely prefer Debian!
Debian :d I have worked (not much) with both. Debian is far more stable, has better support and runs faster. We have lots of stuff on Debian, from SIP proxy server, H323 gatekeepers til strongswan software and also doing hundreds of ipsec manual keying tunnels. My favorite by far
=-.
.-= Cristina a scris pe blog ultima dată we haz Smart Food
I still use Gentoo
What stop you to use a stage4 minimal generic server and deploy it to various machines ? Yes, you loose time but you gain instead a real flexibility and some performance gain.
An emerge -e world took only 1.2 hours on Core i7 860 CPU with /var/tmp/portage mounted as tmpfs in RAM.
Hehe… that’s why I love to install and use Debian!
Debian was my first linux love (now I’m a mac user due to job requirements). If I were to still use linux you can guess what I’d choose.
Both Debian and CentOS are great distros. Anyway, when we are talking about servers I prefer CentOS. Being recomended by cPanel and used on most virtual private servers, CentOS gained a lot of popularity in the last few years and this has a lot of advantages – a lot of discutions on boards and mailing lists, tutorials, case studies etc.
I agree that you can deploy a Debian server much faster, but when it comes to support for a LAMP server on CentOS is a bigger chance that you find someone who already handled the situation and can give you a starting point.
P.S.
When we’re talking about performance and tuning, I prefer FreeBSD. It rocks!
.-= Sergiu Tot a scris pe blog ultima dată PHP rulat ca FastCGI in FreeBSD =-.
“So i prefer .deb based distros because .deb installing is definitely faster than .rpm.” <- And how is this relevant?…
A kickstart minimal install of Centos takes around 5-7 minutes. There are good reasons behind Centos having probably the largest install base among all linux distros, if not of all OSes installed on servers.
[root@acasa radical]# yum install yum-presto.noarch
și viteza se îmbunătățește… din Fedora 13 este activ implicit acest plugin de yum… când o să ajungă în CentOS rămâne de văzut…
Probabil e deja clar că prefer CentOS… oricum nu instalez așa ceva decât pentru uz propriu… mie nu îmi place să-mi bat capu’ cu așa ceva…
E treaba sysadminilor….
Go Emil… go…
.-= eRadical a scris pe blog ultima dată Oracle and Sun =-.
Both Debian and CentOS are great distros. Anyway, when we are talking about servers I prefer CentOS. Being recomended by cPanel and used on most virtual private servers, CentOS gained a lot of popularity in the last few years and this has a lot of advantages – a lot of discutions on boards and mailing lists, tutorials, case studies etc.
But why do we talk about cPanel? This article was about LAMP, and anyway… cPanel overrides all the “distro-way” LAMP by compiling a new “things”, not even packages.
Why should this make a point?
Once upon a time :I was using Debiam but now I am using CentOS on my laptop, web-server and must say I am pretty glad of my choices. It is very stable and customisable.