[lug] How reliable is Linux? (quantitative)

[D. Stimits]

Daniel Webb wrote:
> 
> 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.

I have Netscape 4.78 die on occasion with a Bus Error. About 10% of
those crashes take X11 out also, but I can init 3 and init 5 and have it
back. Not many systems can claim the ability to crash the graphics
display hardware and recover. I'd feel a lot better though if X11 didn't
sometimes crash; my main complaint is that without debugging symbols,
the messages on X11 don't offer enough info to really be helpful.

D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com

> 
> 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
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Web Page:  http://lug.boulder.co.us
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> >
> > --
> > Ferdinand Schmid
> > Architectural Energy Corporation
> > Celebrating 20 Years of Improving Building Energy Performance
> > http://www.archenergy.com
> > _______________________________________________
> > Web Page:  http://lug.boulder.co.us
> > Mailing List: http://lists.lug.boulder.co.us/mailman/listinfo/lug
> >
> 
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