What is the preferred operating system/hardware platform for Wiki?

[Doug Danner]

We are currently exploring the upgrade from 3.3.3 to get to the latest version and would like to insure the future function by moving to the optimal hardware/operating system, Windows, Linux, Solaris platform. Which would be the preferred configuration?

[Davin Studer]

Well that depends upon a whole slew of things. Do you have people in your organization that can support the platform? If you don't have people that can support Windows/Linux/Solaris then you should not install it on that platform respectively. Another thing to look at would be the rest of your environment. If you are primarily a Windows Server shop then it might not make much sense to have one server running on Linux. As for performance I've seen Confluence running on Windows and Linux using everything from MS SQL to MySQL to Postgress and honestly it has performed well on all of them. We currently use Windows Server with MS SQL and have about 2000 people that log in on a regular basis and have not really had issues. So, I would say pick one that suits you and is supported by Atlassian.

[rrudnicki]

Hi Doug, 

There isn’t right or wrong answer to your question.

As my personal opinion, I like the Linux + Postgres and Confluence Standalone. Why?

Because as I’m a Linux guy, I feel more comfortable with this OS. Also, I believe Linux is more customisable than Windows. 

I also like Solaris, especially if you are thinking to user containers (I really love that functionality). 

I suggested you Postgres because the driver is already embedded into Confluence Package, so you don’t need to download any additional driver (as MySQL) and it is a robust database. 

So, your question is very similar like the question “What Linux flavour I should use? Ubuntu, Red Hat, CentOS?” The answer for  these both question is: You should choose the one you feel more comfortable. If the guy (or team) who will support Confluence feel more comfortable with Microsoft + MySQL, then go with it. 

There’s only two things you should concern is with Supported Platforms and Hardware Requirements.

Regards, 

Renato Rudnicki

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Standard response here is definitely what Davin said about "whatever your organisation is best placed to support".

Given a completely free choice of OS though, first choice is Linux, a very close second would be any other Unix variant and a very distant third place would be Windows.  There's a talk about performance of Atlassian applications from the 2013 summit at https://summit.atlassian.com/archives/2013/inside-the-massive-team/the-not-so-dark-art-if-atlassian-performance-tuning that includes the phrase "but, seriously, run it on Linux"

[Davin Studer]

Have you seen Atlassian System Requirements documentation. They give some recommendations.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/System+Requirements

[Doug Danner]

We have expertise in all platforms as well as hardware and support. We are currently running on Sparc/Solaris. I am thinking that the upgrade migration would be easiest to head towards the Solaris X86 since we would have current config files, etc, to refer to.

 Looking at <1000 users , so 2, 3+GHZ Cpu(s) with 4 GB memory might be enough to start with? We are running VM's on esxhosts so scalability at a later date would be possible if increases are warranted by performance statistics.