Using custom kernels

There have been many debates to date about using custom kernels vs tbe stock
kernel from vendors like Redhat and Suse. I know many of the enterprise
vendors like Redhat and Suse, have put extensive amount of work into making
their kernels very streamline and adaptive for various hardware options and
configurations however has anyone really come up with a really optimized
build for their production infrastructure and have seen good success in this
work? Also can you care to comment about maintenance and support issues
especially with 3rd party applications?

I want to know if the optimizations worth the effort? My applications are
multithreaded with most of the i/o being cpu and network bound not many
vendor tools a bulk of it is written in house.

I would love to hear from others who are using a custom kernel build in
their production environment especially for those in the electronic trading
sector.

Thanks.

RB



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