Hi there, I’m working on a project that requires selecting a bunch of rows with (slow) LEFT JOIN calls from a large database and importing them into a different database. I’m running it on a very powerful VPS, but it’s still taking longer than I expected. So I’ve been looking at improving the raw performance. I’ve been testing this project with a Debian 11 host OS, and it basically just works and performance is acceptable, but still feels like it could be improved. So based on some of the Phoronix reviews that show Clear Linux pulling way ahead of other distros in pure raw computational speed I decided to give it a shot, and sure enough it’s running between 5% - 10% faster for the same tasks, which should shave off several hours from the time it will take to run the production database migration.
I’m used to the traditional server administration model of carefully configuring and tuning each and every aspect of the underlying OS and the server application stack, and for that usage scenario I preferred openSUSE Leap or Debian. But now the application I’m going to deploy mainly supports Docker deployments, so the versions and selection of available packages for the host OS aren’t really important. It just needs to have Docker and docker-compose available in the main repos, as I don’t want to depend on Docker’s add-on repos. I like that the Clear Linux core is small and focused, it uses a clean “stateless” system design with the only files in /etc/ being what the administrator has changed from the defaults in /usr/ . The Clear Linux project seems to be serious about security, and automatic updates can be enabled. It has a sane and secure SSH policy out-of-the-box. Reboots are amazingly fast, taking just seconds. I like it enough to consider using Clear Linux on a production VPS that will host a Dockerized web app.
How many of you here are running Clear Linux on a production server workload? Any major pros and/or cons? Thanks!