[lug] How reliable is Linux? (quantitative)

[Rob Nagler]

If you would like anecdotal evidence, our servers have up for a
half-year.  We had to reboot awhile back, because of a motherboard
problem on one of the machines.  We used the other machines for
debugging, so we ended up rebooting most of them.  All of our servers
are running SMP Linux, Mylex RAID, 1GB+ RAM, etc.

Our Apache servers never crash, and we run a complex application in
mod_perl.  To be fair, we restart the slaves nightly, and restart the
server weekly (for new releases).

We have had a number of problems with Oracle of Linux.  It seems that
Oracle corrupts database indexes fairly often.  We have been unable to
track this down.  Moreover, I have not heard of a problem on Solaris.
We run regular table validations, which is the only way we know that
Oracle is corrupt.  It may be that the folks running Oracle on Solaris
don't validate regularly, or they don't have as a transactional
environment as we do.  I find the latter hard to believe.

My biggest complaint is Netscape.  Lately, it has been crashing my
entire desktop on a semi-weekly basis.  I guess KDE 2.1 is partly to
blame.

Rob