I've using Debian since 2010 for some home purposes and it has been stable. Is Debian still a good option if I need a server for heavy network, cpu, disk and memory usage?Last month I listened to some admins say that RedHat is the most stable in bulk operations and that CentOS is a free version of RHEL. Their opinion is that CentOS is the best free distro. CentOS is getting very popular in my country (Dominican Republic) and I've wondered if Debian is getting behind.Can RedHat, Debian, CentOS or Suse be used for bulk operations servers?
Is there a difference of stability between Linux distros?
debian;centos;rhel;suse
This kind of question cannot possibly be answered objectively. For many reasons:The word stable could mean literally anything. It's easy to find benchmarks (random example off Google) comparing certain particular aspects of computing, but to go as far as declare a distro more stable or performant or any other broad term like this is a bit far fetched.There's a big difference between a vanilla install of a distribution and a tweaked one. With proper hacking, Debian, Red Hat, SuSE or any other distro can be made to behave the way you want. In any case, should you encounter any stability/performance issue, you'll find ways to overcome them regardless of the distro you're using.Most of the work that makes a system stable happens in the kernel, that is Linux. Now this may lead distros to act a bit differently, since each ships with separate versions of the kernel, activating certain modules or not. However since installing your own kernel is always an option (again, only do this after profiling your system and detecting issues there), this is not inherent to the distro itself, but to different instances of the kernel.It is a bit misguided to imagine that distros will compete on that level. They usually compete on the level of what admin tools they offer (package management is the best example), the quality of help and documentation (Ubuntu targets the casual desktop user, where Red Hat addresses the seasoned corporate sysadmin) or the quality of their commercial support. My personal advice to you is not to get dragged into these meaningless flamewars (my distro is better than yours). Ultimately, it's a matter of personal preferences. Try something for yourself and you'll quickly realize that even though each distro acts a bit differently, there's virtually nothing one can do that the others can't. It helps knowing someone in real life who's already familiar with one distro (in your case CentOS).Also, Debian is waaaaay more stable than RHEL or CentOS.