Debian Stability

January 25th, 1998

Debian's "master" system is a Pentium 90 with 64MB graciously provided by one of our donors, Novare, who also donate its site in Texas, its support, and its internet connection. It delivers over 100,000 e-mails daily, runs the CVS server for the GNOME project, is our master FTP server with many mirror systems accessing it every day, hosts our bug reporting system and many project utilities, and is the "home" system of our 200 developers, who compile, upload, and download using that system every day. This is a heavier load than people put on a single commercial workstation running anything but Linux. A Microsoft NT system with a Pentium Pro and 128MB RAM would not approach the load this system handles effortlessly every day. The system just ran continuously for three months without a reboot.

The following quote is from Bruce Perens (past president of Debian and board member of SPI) who works at Pixar:

I thought three months without a reboot was a big deal. When I mentioned it to our developers, one of them showed me details about his system. It was up for 458 days, and was halted to move it to another floor. The network and disk device drivers had handled tens of millions of interrupts in that time.