Debian has less complexityand is very stable. It has a nice wiki and a Debian system can run for a few years on unattended upgrades.
Edit: this post was originally about cost savings but that is not really a useful metric
Debian has less complexityand is very stable. It has a nice wiki and a Debian system can run for a few years on unattended upgrades.
Edit: this post was originally about cost savings but that is not really a useful metric
Define what you mean by “overhead”
Mostly RAM usage
The money saved on RAM, if any, is going to be insignificant compared to factors like licensing or paying staff with Linux skills.
Computing resource usage of your OS should be indistinguishable from $0 almost everywhere.
OK, and compared to what? “Less” is a comparison, but you didn’t specify what you’re comparing Debian to.
Out-of-the-box RAM usage is a pretty specious metric because you’re not installing Debian (or any other OS) just to have sit there in its out-of-the-box condition. Do you think a Debian server running Apache with 1000 vhosts will use less RAM than a RHEL server running nginx with 10 vhosts?
Debian uses like 200MBs of ram for a basic fresh install. That’s negligible.
Unless you’re deploying 500 virtual machines on a single server, that all run a single simple basic task the base ram usage of the OS shouldn’t even be a factor.
I think this is a fairly common use case. Maybe not the most common, but I’ve definitely seen this at multiple shops.
Density of RAM on hosts is often a limiting factor for scaling. Not every app is CPU hungry. Some just need to be available, and running a whole is for isolation is the way it’s done in a lot of shops.
For me it uses about 50mb. This means that something like a 1gb ram VM will go much farther.