Maintaining the world’s fastest CDN at Netflix on FreeBSD
Maintaining the world’s fastest CDN at Netflix on FreeBSD
Ironically you can't use FreeBSD (or any BSD) to watch Netflix content. Even on Linux the resolution and bitrate get limited. What a fucking joke.
OSS is only good when they can save money with it, apparently
Of course it is. This is called capitalism, and it sucks.
Fun fact: WhatsApp also used to run their servers on FreeBSD. Then Facebook bought them and now they use Linux.
t y
We did not make a technical choice to abandon FreeBSD in favor or something else, we made an organizational choice to abandon external hosting in favor of owned and operated hosting which required a lot of technical changes, one of which was switching operating systems.
I think Varnish can do 1Tbps with a off the shelf Linux without any special hw/firmware.
I wonder if the need for speed that Netflix requires has any benchmarks that compares FreeBSD with things like OpenBSD, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL and SUSE.
Yes. Maybe a nice one for the Phoronix website ? I'd guess that OpenBSD would not score that high. OpenBSD is cool for firewalls and servers with focus on security but not sure about speed.
It appears that there's a bunch of benchmarks for various flavours of BSD already there. I'm not sure how to compare these with each other and various Linux distributions in a meaningful way.
I would like to know why they prefer FreeBSD to Linux.
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FreeBSD uses the BSD license: https://www.freebsd.org/internal/software-license/
Uhm. AFAIK, you only have to share code under the GPL if you distribute binaries outside your organisation.
If it stays in-house, there's no distribution, thus no requirement to share the source.
I'm happy to be wrong, feel free to point out what I missed.
One reason is the network stack
Can you explain more?