Azure OS choice

RampantAndroid

Diamond Member
Jun 27, 2004
6,591
3
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This is a more generic OS question, so I'll drop it here.

I'm spinning up a VM on Azure, using the A0 pricing plan. It's a "shared" CPU, and 768 MB of RAM for $14 a month. That means a couple websites and a MySQL server for a little more than a single limited MySQL server would otherwise cost on Azure. I just need to maintain the VM.

So, the question is what OS should I use with such limited specs. I can choose Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter, or a couple linux options (Ubuntu Server LTS, CoreOS, CentOS or SUSE enterprise.) I've noticed both sit with memory pretty full right off the bat. Updating Windows Server through Windows Update TANKS the server; CentOS updating via yum leaves the server able to function.

"free -h" on CentOS has this:
Code:
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           670M        111M        139M        4.4M        419M        426M
Swap:            0B          0B          0B

On 2012R2, I have around 200MB available, 550 or so in use. Cached is 174, commited is 1.1GB out of 1.7GB. Paged pool is 109MB, non-paged pool is 155MB.

Now, of these...on the face of it when I'm not using terminal services, Windows seems to be better on RAM usage. However, watching Windows on the CPU usage using the Azure control panel, Windows has at times seemed to use more CPU time up than Linux (though right now, they look about the same.)

Of the memory Linux is using, can it free memory up faster than Windows? Is Apache more efficient with PHP on Linux versus IIS on Windows? Is it really a wash which one I choose to go with? Should I spend the time to write a fast PHP benchmark script and see which one does better?