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Can you help me with my capacity planning?
I'm writing a highly computationally-intensive system that crawls Web-pages, processes them and dumps results into MongoDB. I'd like to pick OS that will use as little resources for itself as possible and provide high performance for my app. Which OS type / version / build would you recommend?
If I were you, I will use any Linux distribution without GUI. This will help you save more from the PC resources. However, your application should be runnable from the command line (CLI) as there will be not GUI at all.
Of course, your application should be also runnable on the chosen OS.
An OS has almost nothing to do with the speed of your application, if that application is properly designed.
If you design your software speed-wise, then you should select the appropriate programming language. The lowest level and fastest would be Assembly, but there may not be enough knowledge 1. to create code, 2. to use higher level functions (like database operation) and development & debugging would be cumbersome and the application will not be cross compatible between OSs.
If you choose a compiled language that would run fast enough and would allow access for easier DB operations, but it might need a specific development environment, and some optimization. Between OSs you would have to recompile the application.
If you select an interpreted language, you may develop your program very fast, DB access would be available with no effort (if there is available library), but the nature of the interpreted languages is that they usually run slower than compiled languages. But you could try your application on a different OS without modification.
Every solution comes with advantages/disadvantages but the OS is indifferent (in terms of speed). For example a for loop from 1 to 256 million is finished within 1 second in C but it takes 35 seconds to complete in Ruby.
