Netflix Continues Experiencing Great Performance In Using FreeBSD For Their CDN

[pal666]

Is this hidden anti systemd propaganda?

it's hard to say. he accuses linux of being too static, while systemd is very dynamic

[pal666]

I noticed my OpenSuse has systemd-bash-completion nowadays

oh, that's certainly sign of imminent systemd demise

[F.Ultra]

I remember seeing pointed out to you that they use standard BSD stack, just running FreeBSD from -CURRENT branch (atm FreeBSD-13) and making use of Mellanox hardware. Yeah, the latter is not your average desktop NIC but it's not supposed to be. It's enterprise use-case after all. Hardware offloading in itself is not something special, there are ton of more common network adapters doing heavy hardware offloading as well. Intel NIC's probably the best known. Why do you suppose these NIC's need passive heat sinks for cooling?

There might be some or even more patches to the kernel - I won't know enough to argue you here, compared to public FreeBSD code but that's pretty standard approach in industry. Unless they want to have the butterfly effect of accumulating patches on top of every new release, they are smart to contribute back as much as possible and keep back as little as possible.

No I pointed that out for myself, and if you check the link I gave in that post you can see how the Netflix devs talk about all the various custom patches that they have implemented on top of -CURRENT in order to handle the amount of traffic that they do.

[F.Ultra]

No but on our cdn centos systems we get systemd crashes about 10-20 a day. Handling the traffic is a piece of cake. Linux handles the load just fine, cpu usage is under 20% utilization (sandy and ivy dual xeon systems), 100GB or more ends up being limited by intel pci express lanes when nvme x4 drives are in play. The next generation stuff should be able to handle 2x100GB and a bank of nvme cache drives. We'll see how good amd's pcie bus is...

Linux does have zero copy api packts. I don't know if nginx uses this feature but ATS does not.

openssl 1.1.1 makes tls handling almost free cpu wise, it is a serious upgrade.

What do you count as a systemd crash? I have a hard time believing that you mean an actual segfault in /lib/systemd/systemd

[F.Ultra]

You should thank hreindl he turned me and a lot of others into anti-systemd trolls.

How can you write a post like that without being embarrassed? Seriously, you can do better than this. What will come next, some other random "globehead" in the Internet that will turn you into a anti non flat earth troll?

[tuxd3v]

I think your post is reasonable, however I think there are still lightweight GNU/Linux options to use in the scenarios you described. For instance:

• https://www.gentoo.org/ - I think it's described as a meta-distro. You can make something very small, optimized and domain specific using it, with convenient tools to cut down work.
• https://www.alpinelinux.org/ - Very small. I think it's mostly focused on running in containers, but I bet it could make for a nice base for a project where you want a stripped down distro.
• https://clearlinux.org/ - If you're using modern Intel hardware, this is probably a decent option to start with. Bleeding edge and performance focused.

Indeed their are yet some light distributions,
But the Distributions we saw in the Past as Full Feature distributions which has the chance to be deployed in the Server has a minimal install..
I was referring to this distributions, they were very optimized and with litle bloatware..

The options that exist now, if full bloatware vs super-light, in the past you had better balanced full distributions..
FreeBSD capitalize on that,
They are not back and front, line GNU/Linux are nowadays( reinventing wheels all the time ), they wait and mature its improvements in a evolutive way..
Linux is coming with dramatic changes, and the tendency is always use more resources, in a manner that a Full fledge Linux Distribution nowadays seems windows in the amount of resources needed..and its also heavily statically parametrized..

This statically parametrized distributions, could be in development environments, but in the Real server space, you want all the juice out-of-it, and the SysAdmin team needs to do its parametrizations to get that...

Long Story Short..
FreeBSD starts to become, "the Linux of some years ago", in that regard, it start to be more appealing to datacenter..

Also all the "Fifth Column"( for those that learned War Strategy... ),
Is turning Linux in a product without a know direction to follow, because its leadership is very constrained in deny some crazy things..

In the past it was rejected, and the project moved on, nowadays with so many interference, its doing a lot of harm to Linux, and besides the fact that I acknowledge Linus is very rigorous...
I also acknowledge the fact that it needs to be that way,
And I support its leadership at all cost, if not, the project is doomed!

[Danielsan]

At this point you must select one of this two choice:

1. FreeBSD is better than Linux for the network stack...
2. FreBSD Admins are better than Linux Admins...

[skeevy420]

no, they don't. android is used by most of devices in the world. apple and sony use bsd because bsd allows them to steal code and they like to steal code.

The PS4 is the most popular and most used game console in the world. Apple makes the most popular desktop OS next to Windows and the most popular mobile OS next to Android. That makes them some of the most popular and used devices in the world. Tis very simple logic.

Personally, I don't count Android due to its horrible update strategy and the fragmentation that has resulted in. Most Android devices do not receive timely updates and most users are locked onto whatever custom version of Android their carrier or manufacturer uses. They're lucky if they get more than one update. Android might be the most popular, but it's also the most fragmented OS since people can be on any of 20 different Android versions. It must suck to be an Android dev these days due to that.

Any OS and Platform that leaves it's users exposed to more exploits than Windows XP, leaves its users at the mercy of corporations for security updates, tries to make it harder to even update the device to a non-corporate version of Android (Lineage, AOSP), and where corporations rig the hardware to make it almost impossible to install an alternate OS on should not be heralded by the open source community.

Yeah, Android is #1 -- at leaving us vulnerable and locked into a corporate ecosystem using the guise of Linux and Open Source. Do no evil, my ass. Android is the most evil thing Google could come up with.

Note: I'm an Android user. I don't like iOS, but at least Apple seems to try in regards to device updates and security.

Hold up, I need to take this Facetime and play some Fortnight and I'll get back to you later.

[Wojcian]

Thanks, that was interesting to read. Do however remember that Netflix runs a highly patched FreeBSD kernel (e.g they perform the TLS encryption inside the network stock) but that one is kinda hard to benchmark since only Netflix have access to it since not all patches have been moved upstream yet (and some might never do).

Glad you like it. One thing comes to my mind when I hear about such politics. Is it accurate to call it 'tivoization'?

[F.Ultra]

Glad you like it. One thing comes to my mind when I hear about such politics. Is it accurate to call it 'tivoization'?

No I would say that what Netflix is doing is just business as usual and following the license. Tivoization is more that you release a piece of hardware that runs free software but where you have put some kind of DRM in the hardware that prevents the user from running modified software so that while you have access to the source code it doesn't really matter since you cannot run it.