Gentoo or Debian on the server?

Question

linux

The question arose - what will work better on the server - Gentoo or Debian? I myself work mostly with Debian, so I'm interested in the pros and cons of Gentoo. Will the server be more productive because the software will be compiled for specific hardware? Maybe there are some other differences / pitfalls?

Answer 1

Productive servers on rolling release are OLLO. Whatever it is.
The theoretical performance gain from source-based is measured in percentage units, but stability does not increase from this.
Genta is great for red-eyed experiments, pumping rare skills and killing extra time.
ONLY DEBIAN, ONLY HARDCORE! DUDES, THE OLD SCHOOL SPIRIT ONLY LIVES IN STABLE DEB DISTRIBUTIONS!

Answer 2

gentoo doesn't have stable builds, so definitely debian.

Answer 3

Better what you know, in your case, choosing Debian is the right decision.
About productivity. then it won't be that much different. I have friends with servers on Ghent. but these servers are only for themselves. and customers are given Debian, Ubuntu or Fryakh
As for the gents , there is something like this

Answer 4

On the production server - only binary distributions.

Answer 5

Yes, you can generally install any distribution kit, and to speed up - pf-kernel (recently there was a post on Habré showing a real performance boost when using this patch).

Answer 6

Try unix distr. They are more suitable for servers. I have freeBSD on my home server.

Answer 7

>> Will the server be more productive because the software will be compiled for specific hardware?
Yes, it will
>> Maybe there are some other differences / pitfalls?
I have them!
The bottom line is:
If you want LAMP (well, or NGinx), then it’s easier, very easier, to install Debian and rebuild PHP to normal 5.3 and higher (I don’t know what stable they have now, maybe they don’t need it anymore). And it will work! Yes, you can still polish it by rebuilding LAM, but that's not the point either.
Another thing is if you want some redis, node-js and other experimental packages.
In Debian, this is sad, moreover, it will not be easy to patch on the fly. Of course, make install still works, but there has been a fair amount of thought about this method recently.
Building a deb package is a bit more tedious than organizing an ebuild. Also, you will have to write debs for new versions of libraries, or use testing or even seed (do you want seed on the server?)
Debian testing has one simple idea - it doesn’t work - roll back. But more often you need something else - it doesn’t work - upgrade. And here Debian has a grusnyak.
In general, everything, as always, depends on the task and your desire to dig into someone else's code or patches for it.
In any case, before rolling Genta onto a server, roll it onto a virtual machine, the pitfalls are all written in the Genta wiki, but the first one is sure to step on something :)

Answer 8

Once upon a time I remember, in production in gentoo, PHP had to be recompiled with some left flags, it was assembled but did not work, there was an annoying error in the flags.
the rebuild cost me 40 minutes of server downtime.
oh well, there was a CS server on the server, what was it like playing on the server, on which all the resources were spent on compilation ... I don’t even know
But I repeat then gentoo was specifically for experiments, it was then specially because the repository of sorts was much less traffic than batch ones, which significantly saved student money.
in production debian, well, on the edge of LTS ubunts.