FreeBSD 5.4 or 6 for DB server with 9500S-4 ?

[ray at redshift.com]

| Again, my point was that 6.0-RELEASE is not the 'newest/latest untested 
| release', but rather that it comes as a new version number to a large number of 
| improvements over the 5.4 branch. While I have no 'cold hard numbers' to support 
| my benchmarking, I will say from experience running 6.0 in production now for a 
| few months (actually have a production server environment running 6.0-RC1, 
| because on the AMD64 platform it proved to be more stable and more complete than 
| 5.4-RELEASE did). I had many issues with various libraries in FreeBSD 5.4, 
| especially in areas of ldap client, threads, and a port of nss_ldap. All of 
| which is based on the same code I've been running for a LONG time on other 
| machines now. Without digressing too far from the subject, the bottom line was 
| 6.0 did (and still does) run cleaner, and faster without the stability issues I 
| encountered with 5.4 on AMD64 platform - and as I said in my original reply I 
| disagree because 6.0 is not as new as you claim. Generally, I share the same 
| opinion as yourself - don't jump to something new just because it's new, stick 
| with what's tried-and-true. That being said, I still stand to my original remark 
| when I say with some confidence that 6.0 - IS tried-and-true, and I can back 
| that up with at least the last 4 months of day-to-day production use of it.

That's certainly good to hear.  I wasn't trying to suggest FreeBSD 6.0 is buggy.
 As I mentioned previously, I'm constantly impressed by how stable FreeBSD is.
My only point was that in general it can be risky to suddenly jump to something
new.  Since 6.0 is relatively new, I was just suggesting to Olaf that perhaps he
should stick with 5.4, since he's dealing with a lot of variables.  

I plan to move to 6.0 to do some testing myself in a few months here.  It's good
to hear you have been using it for 4 months with no troubles.

| > | Same response. Look at the SMP file, it's basically "options smp; include 
| > | GENERIC"... just copy the GENERIC to your own config, remove the driver(s)
you 
| > | don't require, add 'options SMP' and any other options you may wish -
rename the 
| > | config and go from there.
| > 
| > When I first moved from i386 to AMD64, that one tripped me up but good! :)  I
| > was so used to just editing GENERIC, I didn't even look at SMP or realize it
was
| > there for about 3 days.
| 
| Yeah, caught me too - didn't even realize one could do an include-xyz from a 
| kernel config file. Guess that's how one learns though eh ;)

:-)  I'm glad I'm not the only one that got.  I felt like a total dolt when I
spent nearly 2 weeks running benchmarks to compare i386/Xeon vs AMD64/Opteron
only to find out I had accidently compiled out SMP on the AMD64 OS!  DOH!  No,
wait, that would actually be (DOH*DOH)/.00001
 
| Again, 6.0 is NOT as new as you keep trying to stress it. Read the archives 
| regarding why the release numbering jumped from 5.4 -> 6.0; and try asking those 
| who have been running 6 for > 5-6months now without issue. In my case, I had 
| issues with stability and librairies in 5.4 that forced me to prematurely move 
| over to 6.0 - a step I did not take lightly with terabytes of data and a lot of 
| users on the line. I did the research, talked to people running 6, and did as 
| you suggested 'posting a thread for 5.4 vs 6.0 in production', check the list 
| archives if you missed it.

I wasn't stressing it's bad.  I was simply saying that a lot of times new
software has things that need to be worked out.  I think that's true with
anything.  Look at the Ferrari 355 and 360 - only a very brave man/woman buys
the first year car from Ferrari! :-)  Their policy seems to be "let the client
figure out what's wrong with our cars, then we'll fix it for future clients".
FreeBSD seems to always be very stable right out of the box, but you have to
admit those -p levels are there for a reason :-)  
 
| I'm not trying to provoke you here, and I'm glad for the debate - but sometimes 
| I tend to come off as though I'm trying to fight or argue... that's my bad, and 
| just want to make sure you don't feel like I'm attacking/defending against you. 
| I'd wish you a good weekend too, except that it's Monday now and I'm just 
| getting back to reading my email ;)

Thanks Nathan.  I know things don't always come across right over e-mail since
you can't see people, hear voices, etc.  Like you, I enjoy a good debate about
something and think it's always good to listen/explore all concepts, ideas.
Once that's done and the points are made, then it's back to being friends :)

Ray