๐Ÿš€ After 18 years on Ubuntu, we've upgraded the @openstreetmap servers to Debian 12 (Bookworm). ๐ŸŒ openstreetmap.org is now faster using Ruby 3.1.

OpenStreetMap migrates to Debian 12

submited by
Style Pass
2024-11-28 01:00:02

๐Ÿš€ After 18 years on Ubuntu, we've upgraded the @openstreetmap servers to Debian 12 (Bookworm). ๐ŸŒ openstreetmap.org is now faster using Ruby 3.1. Onward to new mapping adventures! Thank you to the team for the smooth transition. #OpenStreetMap #Debian ๐Ÿค“

There is a large overlap between OpenStreetMap mappers and the Debian community. Debian also has excellent coverage of OpenStreetMap tools and utilities, which helped with the decision to switch to Debian.

Part of our reason to move to Debian was to get closer to the maintainers of the packages that we depend on. Debian maintainers appear to be heavily invested in the software packages that they support and we see critical bugs get fixed.

OpenStreetMap.org is primarily run on actual physical hardware that our team manages. We attempt to squeeze as much performance from our systems as possible, with some services being particularly I/O bound. We ran into some severe I/O performance issues with kernels ~6.0 to < ~6.6 on systems with NVMe storage. This pushed us onto newer mainline kernels, which led us toward Debian. On Debian 12 we could simply install the backport kernel and the performance issues were solved.

Thankfully we manage our server setup nearly completely with code. We also use Test Kitchen with inspec to test this infrastructure code. Tests run locally using Podman or Docker containers, but also run as part of our git code pipeline.

Leave a Comment