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Centos 7 vs Centos 8 - What is your experience as a hoster?
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Member
Hi,
Can anyone share some experience about performance or ressource usage from CentOS 7 to CentOS 8 ?
I am asking because i was using CL7 before and now switched to CL8 (providing WP hosting solutions - "shared hosting server") - All settings are same regarding mariadb, kernel tuning etc - But somehow the CL8 is taking more ressources than CL7 - The performance is also degraded due to higer load/ressource usage (esspecially CPU) - Now i am aware that 2 setups arent 100% same and you cannot blame the main version for it and circumstances must also be 100% same (which is not that easy when things are in production), but i still have my doughts on the CL8/CentOS8
I am digging into it for time being, but could be nice if there are other people who can either confirm or reject my theory based on some real experience.
FYI - my stack:
Bare-metal Dell server
CL8
DirectAdmin
Litespeed
(it is though not a question about configuration)
Thanks!
Comments
It is only natural that later versions of a software will require more resources. They are needed to facilitate new features.
It requires more horsepower because it’s “enterprise”.
So is 7 better for now??
Not quite. If all you need is low resource consumption, 7 will obviously be better. However, CentOS 8 will provide more recent updates, security patches, and software. on CentOS 8, you'll also get more support for recent software. They're both perfectly good OS's, but it really depends on your use-case for the OS.
It also depends on if your going to use a control panel. Currently cpanel does not support Centos 8. DirectAdmin supports Centos 8
CentOS-7 won't reach End of Life until June 2024 = a few years yet....
I will setup a identical dedi server with CentOS 7/CL7 and do some benchmarks.
I can't see or feel any performance advantage with CentOS8/CL8 - it is opposite in my case.
I am yet to use CentOS 8 in a production environment. All the software need to be more polished/bug free on CentOS 8.
I do wish CentOS8 kept the minimal install that 6 and 7 had. Then we can add what we like. If I recall a minimal CentOS8 is liek 2GB installed or so?
CentOS 8 can be installed on servers with 1GB of RAM, and now supports 4GB of memory. The system is more stable, but some aspects of configuration and settings differ from the 7th version.
CentOS8 does install quite a bit more junk by default. The "tuned" stuff always running, and "cockpit" annoyances come to mind. In the case of a web site, I suppose it could be the stronger crypto defaults requiring more CPU time per visitor. Using CentOS8 for a few things, but nothing that was right on the edge of tipping over, where I'd notice minor performance differences. No substitute for looking around on the server, profiling performance and tracking things down.
CentOS supported way more than 4GB of memory many versions sgo.
Doesn't everyone just keep a bunch of apt/yum/dnf commands in a text file of all the apps to remove and install on a fresh server anyway?
Think he meant "recommends", not "supports".
I git clone a directory full of setup scripts, cd to it, and type ./setup
Good idea. Does the execute bit get stored in git for the setup script? Another command would be a deal breaker. In fact, the whole changing directory is redundant work and I'll do away with that.
It may be more than you need, but you should look into config management software such as Ansible, which can do this and more.
After spending a little time learning it, I now have some nice playbooks that handle the setup and configuration of packages on new systems.
Ansible is prem!
Exactly) In general, more memory is needed, especially for Linux systems. For a small project, 2GB is enough for CentOS 8, but with a stretch.
I did years ago when Cloud at Cost had a working API that I could use to reboot them when their storage went awol. After they killed the API, it wasn't worth the effort for the few times I'd need it.
I'm not a webhost, but when I switched from Centos 7 to Centos 8 I also noticed a higher load on the server. I currently use Debian 10.
Would you mind sharing the git repo?
I do. Just copy and paste and wait until it's done. Then install DirectAdmin.
I looked at CentOS 8 once and I believe you can still install Minimal even though you have to download the full version or you can use the boot iso. You can create your own private repository on your own network to speed things up.
Yeah, you do. But you can always get the netinstall, and do a minimal, but requires internet of course.
How are those using Centos 7 dealing with the lack of TLS 1.3 in apache? I want to stay with 7 but it seems there is no way to get TLS 1.3 which all clients need now due to web browsers complaining if not offered.
Simple don't use CentOS 7 native Apache YUM package and roll your own Apache RPMs against OpenSSL 1.1.1 or own Nginx against OpenSSL 1.1.1. I build my own Apache OpenSSL 1.1.1 TLSv1.3 supported RPMs in the past. But mainly, I've been using Nginx with TLSv1.3 since it came out as my Nginx builds support both OpenSSL 1.1.1 and Google BoringSSL offered TLSv1.3
Already been playing with Cloudflare's Nginx HTTP/3 Quiche patch and soon official Nginx's preview HTTP/3 branch to prepare for Nginx HTTP/3 
Just checked and I've been using Nginx with TLSv1.3 support since March 2017 so more than 3+ yrs on CentOS 7 ^_^
I'm still working through my Centmin Mod's CentOS 8 dev/compatibility work https://community.centminmod.com/threads/centmin-mod-centos-8-compatibility-worklog.18372/ but the very nature of CentOS 8 and Redhat 8's min/recommended system requirements are telling in that they doubled the min/recommended memory requirements in 8.x versus 7.x but if you dig deeper into documentation, they are being a bit more cautious in their recommendations as it's dependent on how you use and configure CentOS 8.
@eva2000 - that's what i've done in the past with centos 3 to 6 (for both httpd and php - various reasons on each) but I had hoped that, finally, I could just use the stock rpms. Using stock rpms with centos 8 I've been ok (though i do use custom php binaries at times).
My more broad interest was how your more average user handles this. I suppose I'm really surprised that RedHat didn't go ahead and backport TLS 1.3 into their current versions. It is such a major requirement now for websites.
I'd love to move to nginx (and do run nginx ssl proxies for some sites) but too many legacy needs keep my projects tied to apache.
The boot iso I mentioned is the old netinstall.
OOOOooo, CentOS 8 released an official minimal install.