[lug] How reliable is Linux? (quantitative)

[Daniel Webb]

I have used 4.77 from Debian testing for quite a while now, and although
it does crash itself every 2-3 days, it never takes anything with it.

When I was using Redhat with Linux 2.4.5, I experienced maybe two kernel
crashes in a year, and 5 KDE crashes.  With Debian and 2.4.10 kernel I've
had no kernel and two KDE crashes in five months.

I would guess that Linux is more stable than the hardware if you are using
regular PC stuff.

> I am running Netscape (both, CC4.78 and N6.2.1) on my system.  When I
> reboot it is for kernel upgrades or hardware upgrades.  I haven't seen a
> Netscape crash that affected my system in over a year.  I have been
> running KDE 2.0 and currently am running 2.2.2.  No problems.
>
> Based on this experience I would assume that you have some configuration
> conflict going on there.  Even Netscape itself hardly ever crashes here
> - maybe once every 2 months.
>
> Ferdinand
>
> Rob Nagler wrote:
> >
> > 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
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> --
> Ferdinand Schmid
> Architectural Energy Corporation
> Celebrating 20 Years of Improving Building Energy Performance
> http://www.archenergy.com
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