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Comment by dazzawazza | Hacker News Reader

If rails causes a kernel panic then this is really a bug in the kernel. No user land app should ever do this. Why not try to scale on *BSD or Windows all of whom have different kernel and scale just fine?

$100,000 and no one said "hey what about running it on <insert other os>"?

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Or just changing kernel version?

It's quite fascinating really, especially in 2012 to give up because of software failure.

If you read the email I wrote, it's clear that we're not "giving up because of software failure." Look at it again and you'll see it's a different reason altogether.

I'm as bewildered as all of you. But let's give them the benefit of doubt, he probably just forgot to mention that they tried other OSes. I mean, who wouldn't?

Did they try other kernel versions? Other Ruby VMs? This is a terribly weak excuse. It's like quitting your job because you can't get the printer driver working.

Yes, "Amy" is a historically male name.

Sorry, I guess I wasn't paying attention to the name and defaulted to male when I wrote the comment. I'll try not to do that again.

This is normal for Ubuntu kernels from experience. They are shitty. Various server releases have given us hell. They're fudging them somehow.

We moved to debian after numerous problems and have had no issues since.

Yeah, when I see people running Ubuntu for their production servers I always assume it's developers with minimal system admin experience who just want to use the same distro for their server as their desktop. I've got nothing against Ubuntu, and have even used it to convert a few windows users over, but if you're going to run a production server then install Debian on it.

Well it was our operations guys who refused anything but Ubuntu because "they had installed it at home". We now no longer have operations guys and the development team own the infrastructure :)

I have been using Debian since 1996, and became a package maintainer in 1997, a position I held for nearly a decade until I began to not have enough time for it. While continuing to think that Debian is a first-rate effort, I got tired of certain aspects of it, and moved to Ubuntu, lock stock and barrel. I actually like to have my desktop system marching in sync with my server, so that the packages are pretty much exactly the same. And you know what? Ubuntu works pretty well on the server, and comes out with nice regular releases, allowing me to decide, and gauge, time-wise, when to upgrade. Certainly, like everything else, it has its defects, but by and large, I've had good luck with it, as both a desktop and server distribution.

Do you have links to bugreports to your problems by any chance? Or more detail on what problems you ran into so I could have the Ubuntu kernel team check them out?

They were submitted to launchpad over a year ago. No action was taken by canonical despite extensive debugging information being provided.

I don't have the report ids any more.

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind for the future.

I don't even know what we're running Freckle on, because it's an app that's had zero problems. Alas, Charm is a troubled baby.

Exactly. There's loads of Unixen they could have tried. There's also tons of people running Rails. Though I'm not a big fan of Rails I can't deny there's a lot of it running successfully. There's got to be more to this story!

I'm pretty sure a lot of people are running Linux and the world's largest websites...

Just saying.

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