Re:Debian? (Score 1)

There may or may not be that much performance gain from compiling from source, but depending on what your sysadmins cost, having the ability to run

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

and have your system be automatically updated could end up being more cost effective than additional support even if that means that you have to buy more/bigger hardware.

Actually it is quite possible to get the best of both worlds - or even better - at least if the cluster nodes are reasonably identical. Just use one box for building the binary packages and have a local repository. Set all the cluster nodes to only use your own repository, and have them update automatically with a cron job.

On your build box, you update as normally from standard repositories, but those packages you want to build yourself, you set a pin for, so they don't update.

When you build a package, you can use the source package and apply patches and options to suit your environment, or you could even build a package from scratch. (Since you have a cluster, distcc might be useful when building.)

When everything works put the packages in the repository.

In case you require all nodes to have the same version, it might be smarter to have a script which handles the updating.