from which OS? Ubuntu? Rocky/RHEL? Windows Server?
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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Mostly Ubuntu. Comes with a ton of extras installed which add storage and ram usage along with additional complexity.
Ubuntu server has a minimal server installation option.
Yeah the more I think about the sillier this post is.
Compared to Arch Linux then yeah you'll save a ton of money almost guaranteed. But something like Windows? Good luck trying to calculate that.
I wouldn't even deploy Arch in production as its not designed to be stable.
I mean you'd have to be pretty insane to use Arch on an actual server.
That or a masochist.
I don't really subscribe to Arch or Debian being better or worse than each other. I encounter issues just as frequently on both. Maybe it's a little harder to do things in Debian because the repositories don't update as often but the AUR is where a lot of important stuff is and that's a pain to deal with too.
Either way it's better than using Windows.
Define what you mean by "overhead"
Mostly RAM usage
The money saved on RAM, if any, is going to be insignificant compared to factors like licensing or paying staff with Linux skills.
Computing resource usage of your OS should be indistinguishable from $0 almost everywhere.
OK, and compared to what? "Less" is a comparison, but you didn't specify what you're comparing Debian to.
Out-of-the-box RAM usage is a pretty specious metric because you're not installing Debian (or any other OS) just to have sit there in its out-of-the-box condition. Do you think a Debian server running Apache with 1000 vhosts will use less RAM than a RHEL server running nginx with 10 vhosts?
Debian uses like 200MBs of ram for a basic fresh install. That's negligible.
Unless you're deploying 500 virtual machines on a single server, that all run a single simple basic task the base ram usage of the OS shouldn't even be a factor.
I think this is a fairly common use case. Maybe not the most common, but I've definitely seen this at multiple shops.
Density of RAM on hosts is often a limiting factor for scaling. Not every app is CPU hungry. Some just need to be available, and running a whole is for isolation is the way it's done in a lot of shops.
For me it uses about 50mb. This means that something like a 1gb ram VM will go much farther.
I love it. More stable than many things. Preseeds for PXE.
I don't have to fuss on my fun systems.
Work systems are different. Works great when it is a nice fit. Use mostly RHEL family there, and dislike the rolling upgrades. (Breaking changes between "minor" version changes. Rarely an issue on Debian.)