Debian reliability on the report
Posted Apr 18, 2008 22:50 UTC (Fri) by
man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to:
Reliability: Unix and Linux beat Windows (heise online) by jordip
Parent article:
Reliability: Unix and Linux beat Windows (heise online)
The answer lies more in the atrocious reporting methodology. Centering just on one sentence, the relevant slide (a ridiculous pdf with 2 pages) says literally "OpenSource Linux (e.g. Debian)". Where:
- "OpenSource" does not exist: according to its proponents it is "open source".
- Most Linii (or Linuxes, if you prefer) on the page are "open source": Red Hat, SUSE (not "SuSe" as it appears, which is not even "SuSE" as in the original German), Mandriva, Ubuntu, etc. No reason to single out Debian.
- "Open source Linux", even if referring to "Community distro", should include everything from Fedora to Debian to Gentoo to home-grown distros.
- Even if limited to distros maintained by the community, there are a lot of them including Debian, Gentoo, Puppy Linux...
- Even if limited to Debian, the report makes clear that "24% of the respondents reporting they had at least one Debian server in their network", which does not look like actual production servers. Rather it might be experimental or unmaintained machines.
- Debian administrators are not "hackish". Depending on how you define downtime, something which is of course absent from the report or the slides, Debian servers do not suffer downtime just because of bugs; once they are in production they stay there for years. What is true is that Debian administrators may work in more precarious conditions than others: I used to run several experimental servers and my only downtimes were related to grid failures, something which a proper setup would have avoided.
- And as pointed out above, Laura DiDio is not likely to elicit honest responses from a variety of Debian administrators.
There are many other problems with the report. Just see how "Other Linux" varies wildly from one year to the next, or how last year's "Unix (AIX, Solaris, HPUX)" with 6,54 hours of downtime have magically transmogrified into three categories with less than 2 hours each. I seriously doubt proprietary Unix has turned 4 times as reliable in this time. And "Customizations" have mixed effect on reliability, even worse when combined with last year's data.
It is therefore hard to extract meaningful conclusions from the figures reported. If I had to, I'd say that people are still reluctant to run mission-critical services on Debian, and that is why Debian servers are more likely to suffer downtime than the Red Hat counterparts. In this case it is no reflection on the quality of the OS, but on how much the machines are cared for. And that is maybe why proprietary Unices have grown in reliability: only legacy services are still running on these servers, and they are the most reliable since they do little work and are never modified. More demanding applications have migrated to Linux in many cases.
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