} For those of you with large scale sites, is there a particular linux } distro that seems to work best with rails. Or is there a distro i should } stay away from? For servers that I setup right now, I use CentOS and } gentoo. Thanks!
Distro doesn't matter. Kernel might. Hardware does. If you like CentOS and gentoo, go ahead and use them. I much prefer Debian. Work uses Redhat. Whatever.
The more interesting question is probably how you will deploy your app. Part of that is stuff like lighttpd vs. mongrel vs. whatever. Part of it is whether you will want to use your distribution's package management system to manage versioning of your app and such. Part of it is making sure that all the moving parts (web server, file server, memcached/Drb, database, etc.) stay up and get bounced when necessary.
When it comes to large sites, the watchword should be "repeatability." If you don't have a repeatable process for bringing a new machine from zero to fully functioning member of your server farm (whether web server, load balancer, DB server, rails server, etc.), you're screwed.
--Greg
