Karachi. I run whatever the hosting provider in Lahore gives me. Usually CentOS or Alma with systemd. Price is the deciding factor, init system is not even on the list. My last box was $4/month for 1GB. If it had runit I would still pay $4.
systemd or OpenRC on your VPS?
I switched a home lab to Devuan once. Spent a weekend getting basic things working. It felt like 2005 again. Learned a lot, would not repeat for production.
Austin TX. Mail delivery is weirdly sensitive to init timing. Postfix under systemd sometimes gets socket activation wrong on boot if your network is not up yet. I have seen this on two providers now. OpenRC serializes better in that specific case. But I still run systemd because everything else is worse.
SPF, DKIM, DMARC — holy trinity ✉️
BlogTier said:
Same.
Same. My 512MB box runs systemd fine though. I think people overestimate how heavy it is. My actual problem is always php-fpm or mysql eating RAM, not init.
Has anyone actually measured boot time difference on a VPS? Not a local VM, actual cloud instance with network metadata services and all that. I timed my DO droplet at 8 seconds to SSH regardless of what I think init is doing.
I run Alpine with OpenRC on a Vultr 512MB box specifically because it is lighter. Not faster to boot, but more RAM left for actual work. 40-50MB difference which matters at that size. Would not bother on 2GB+.
Izmir
Member
I find best price for you my friend. Many provider give systemd template. If you want OpenRC you install yourself. I see customer do this, then they open ticket why something not work. I tell them use template.
Systemd on everything. Ubuntu, Debian, Rocky. The only time I cared was debugging a stuck mount unit that blocked shutdown. Fixed with a timeout option I found in the man page. Before systemd I would have been grepping through init scripts.
This thread is missing the security angle. systemd has had CVEs. OpenRC has had fewer. But systemd also gets more scrutiny. I do not know how to weigh that. I run systemd because my distro does.
olya said:
Snapshot first. The free tier allows 5 boot volumes, use one.
Wait, you can have 5 boot volumes on always free? I thought it was 2. Did they change it or am I thinking of block volumes?