Question

Are there major or minor disadvantages (or advantages for that matter) to running FB on Linux?

I'm currently running it on Windows...actually a virtual server hosted at hostmysite.com. FB is eating up a lot of RAM with SQL Server (lot's of transactions occurring in the FB database).

I'm considering moving my FB installation to a much less expensive hosting plan at GoDaddy or some similar host using a Linux plan. I'd obviously then need to run the PHP/MySQL version of FB.

I've read the pages here about how to convert the FB db from SQL Server to MySQL and get it running in the PHP/Linux version of FB.

So, are there any serious potential issues I should consider? It'd be nice to pay a whole lot less to host my install of FB. But I will admit that once I install FB (I've moved it around a couple times) I rarely if ever have to deal with any issues of the installation in Windows (not sure if that's a factor of Windows or the fact that FB is such a fantastically built product...or both).

Answer 1

Our customer count is much less on Linux so our dev resources get devoted to Windows first. With FogBugz 7, the Unix release will be much more stable however, so besides the time aspect, I don't expect quite the trouble with setup anymore... but the Unix/Mac setup has notoriously been the biggest support cost for our company.

UPDATE: FogBugz 7 for Linux and Mac now installs its own instance of apache and mono, so all the problems associated with the wide variation of individual PHP installs are gone.

Answer 2

This does not directly address your issue regarding risks of migrating the database, but does give some positive feedback about moving to Linux.

I currently host both Fogbugz and Code Collaborator on the same Dell BLADE Server (model 1955). This server has 8GB RAM, dual Quad-core Xeon 2.33GHz processors, and about 76GB on the /var partition. We are running this server in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 environment, and MySQL DB, environment. I've been very pleased with the performance of both applications, and being able to do MySQL replication for FB and Code Collaborator (both use MySQL) to our Disaster Recovery location offsite.

We have roughly 60 users created in Fogbugz (maybe 5~10 users in at once), with about 6,000 cases currently created.

I would definitely recommend going to a Linux server, but remember to not install the GUI (X-windowing) environment. This will save you resources from not having to run a stupid graphical interface.

Answer 3

We've just recently upgraded our Linux FB6 to FB7 and we're much happier with the new setup and bundled apache/mono environment. Of course, we blew up our PHP based FB6 version which is what "encouraged" us to move to FB7 at 2 PM one afternoon!!

Kudos to the FB team for moving to a single codebase and getting away from those ghastly PHP issues.

In other words Kevin, make the jump to Linux.

Answer 4

Alas, the Linux version is always months and months behind Windows...