Hi everyone.
I'm currently running the following:
Hardware: Dell PowerEdge 2850 rack mounted server, Dual 3.4 Ghz Xeon,
5 Gb memory
Hard Drives: LSILogic PERC 4e/Di, configured as RAID 5, with 3 X 40
Gb disks
OS: FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE-p6 for amd64
It's sole purpose is to be an SQL server, and that's about the only
thing that's running on it, namely:
mysqld Ver 4.1.16 for portbld-freebsd5.4 on amd64 (FreeBSD port:
mysql-server-4.1.16)
The server is rather heavily loaded, and 8 or 9 months ago, I had
problems with it spontaneously "hard" rebooting irregularly every few
days to several weeks. All the hardware tested out fine, but it
acted as if someone just pulled the plug and then plugged it back in
(looking through the log files showed everything working fine, and
then suddenly the logs would start showing messages from the boot
sequence). Of course, the disks would then be scanned for errors,
and sometimes the SQL databases needed repairs from the unexpected
restart. There weren't real power fluctuations involved - the
machine was on a building-wide UPS, and several other machines in the
same cabinet plugged into the same power source never had issues -
and the PowerEdge itself has two power supplies. I never was able
to track down definitively what was causing the problem (especially
since it was sporadic), but eventually found that by disabling
hyperthreading, it never crashed again. I don't know why, or even
if, it fixed anything, but since it hasn't crashed since then,
haven't wanted to touch it.
In any case, the server is used heavily all year except July, so this
is my time of year to take things apart, update software, etc. And
so I'm wondering - what is the recommended version of FreeBSD I
should be running if stability is of the utmost importance? Should I
migrate to the 6.x stream? Is it relatively solid? Or should I stay
with 5.4 for now? I've seen some messages posted periodically from
various people running into problems, but am wondering if it's just
relatively isolated incidents or if there are fairly common problems
with stability. I could keep running what I'm running now, but since
this is the month to update things that are appropriate to update, I
thought I'd ask. I don't want to stay with the 5.4 release
indefinitely if the cessation of security patches loom on the
horizon. Plus, if 6.x is stable with hyperthreading, I'd like to
turn it back on. I heard about the information disclosure
vulnerability on hyperthreaded CPUs, but I'm under the impression
that it can only be exploited by other local users. I'm the only
user on that machine, so if so, that vulnerability shouldn't affect
me, and I'd like to squeak out every bit of performance possible.
I'll probably be upgrading to MySQL 5.0 along the way too, unless
anyone has any horror stories to share there :-)
Thanks for any help or advice you can give!
Dan
--
Syzygy Research & Technology
Box 83, Legal, AB T0G 1L0 Canada
Phone: 780-961-2213
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