Exploring Devuan as a GNU/Linux Server Platform

Dr. Roy Schestowitz

2019-10-23 20:17:36 UTC
Modified: 2019-10-23 20:17:36 UTC

Serving about 20 million requests over the past month

Tux chair

Summary: Techrights will explore a migration to Devuan some time in the coming weeks or months

THE UPLOAD above is an image from figosdev, not exactly a fan of systemd. But he's not alone. Other people, including associates of ours, have grown tired of systemd for purely technical reasons. It causes issues. Techrights still needs to run jobs in the background to ameliorate such issues. I myself have been more or less neutral or at least apathetic on the matter for many years. To be frank, init systems (systemd was initially introduced as such) aren't something I'm sufficiently familiar with to comment on.

We recently noted that we had run the site on CentOS since 2006. This, however, might change soon. We might experiment with Devuan and see how well it works as a server. There should be plenty of time to entertain the idea and experiment around Christmas. This isn't yet a promise that we will make the move, only an assurance that the possibility is being explored. ⬆

Comments

Canta

2019-10-24 02:14:02

It shouldn't be too much of a hussle to change from centos-based to debian-based for a web server. But if it's about toying around, did you ever considered the idea of rpi webservers? You keep the current server(s) for dbs/files, and put rpis in front of it all. This offloads the webserver cpu usage and also its cache. I'm wondering if it's a sustainable setup.

Dr. Roy Schestowitz

2019-10-24 04:04:59

Adding more machines would increase maintenance overhead and cause other issues I can think of. The database is the main bottleneck (we don't serve static like we used to with Varnish).

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Exploring Devuan as a GNU/Linux Server Platform

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