System Support

[James Wilkinson]

Frederico Madeira <fred at ocn.com.br> wrote:
> a default instalation of fc3 support how mutch of memory ? and how is
> the max file size that they support ??

The same as the underlying Linux kernel.

On x86, you should be able to get at least 64 GB of memory. On anything
with that much memory, you'd be using a kernel with the 4G/4G patch,
which is supposed to handle up to 200 GB of memory:
http://lwn.net/Articles/39283/

On AMD64, you should have support for about 1 TB of memory.

The Linux documentation states that these days, these are the limits for
the ext2 or ext3 filesystems (from Documentation/filesystems/ext2.txt)

# Filesystem block size:     1kB        2kB        4kB        8kB
#
# File size limit:          16GB      256GB     2048GB     2048GB
# Filesystem size limit:  2047GB     8192GB    16384GB    32768GB

(8K blocks are only available on systems like the Digital Alpha).

If you're getting anywhere near those limits, IMHO you should be
creating a special filesystem for the unusual data. So, for a database
system, you'd want to create a special database FS with 4K block sizes.

Frederico also asked:
> FC3 is good for database and webserver ???

Wong Kwok-hon wrote:
> I think u should use Redhat 9  or FC2 instead because there are being
> stabler than FC3 as u saw many asking for fix in FC3.

Um.

I think we're just seeing teething troubles with people installing FC3.
We saw the same with FC2. It looks like we're going to continue to get
most of these *install* problems before other distros, due to the sheer
amount of features that are being enabled.

I'd say that we're seeing this mainly at distro install or update: the
distribution appears to be working well with itself, and providing a
very good platform. It's just when it has to rely on indifferent and
varied hardware to which the Fedora team don't have access that we see a
lot of problems.

Once you've got FC3 up and working, there don't seem to be that many
other problems.

But I still wouldn't use it as a "mission-critical" database or
web-server. The distribution is supposed to move fast, and does so. But
you don't want that in a mission-critical system.

You'd be better off with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or one of the (legal)
clones like White Box Linux. They've been tested that much more, and are
intended to have support for at least five years.

Hope this helps,

James.

-- 
E-mail address: james | Blessed are the pessimistic, for they take backups.
@westexe.demon.co.uk  |