So,
I’ve never bothered with this before, since systemD seems to work just fine.
But I did this year stop using Ubuntu for most of my hosting needs and moved to Alpine or Debian, depending on what I’m doing.
So it makes sense to optimize even more. I read up a little about why people dislike systemD. Good reasons if mainly you’re worried that it’s doing too much and is too heavy.
So what are the alternatives that work with both Alpine and Debian? What are people using? Is it relatively easy to move from systemD to whatever is your alternative?
Thanks!
You make it sound like Debian is obviously superior to Alpine. Alpine Linux is just fine for server tasks. It is nice that is it lightweight, but that isn’t the only thing it has going for it.
Debian is superior for server tasks. musl is designed to optimize for smaller binaries on disk. Memory is a secondary goal, and cpu time is a non-goal. musl isn’t meant to be fast, it’s meant to be small and easily embedded. Those are great things if you need to run in a network/disk constrained environment, but for a server? Why waste CPU cycles using a libc that is, by design, less time efficient?
EDIT: I had to fight this fight at my job. We had hundreds of thousands of Alpine containers running, and switching them to glibc-based containers resulted in quantifiable cloud spend savings. I’m not saying musl (or alpine) is bad, just that you have horses for courses.
I’ve used Alpine on servers a lot and didn’t notice any performance difference when compared to glibc in the vast majority of cases. This performance comparison even suggests that musl is quite a bit faster in some cases and in most instances it is at least as fast as glibc, which matches my experience.
I’m not entirely sure how “… don’t need anything near as memory efficient as Alpine” became “Debian is obviously superior to Alpine”.
… I was referencing systemd and familiarity of use in regard to OP. Debian just happened to be mentioned, it comes per default with systemd, and it’s my personal first choice for servers. Though, taking context into account, OP did say they originally came from Ubuntu and made it sound like they were trying to optimize their system since it “only” had 4(8)GB memory in total.
I do believe Debian with systemd is more similar to Ubuntu than Alpine is to Ubuntu. My point was not so much about Debian vs Alpine in general as it was specific to efficiency in regard to memory usage, with the sole reason to change to Alpine over Debian (or any OS which uses systemd, really) purely for memory savings being rather weak when systemd only uses some <50MB in memory, the computer has 4GB+ of it, and the user already is familiar with Debian-based flavors which use systemd.
So no, Debian is obviously not “obviously superior to Alpine”, just as systemd isn’t too heavy to run on computers with 4GB of RAM - unless you’re trying to push the computer to its limits.
Okay, thanks for the explanation!
This was what made me assume this: