Ori: Another Open-Source Distributed File-System

[david_lynch]

Super computers these days *are* toys, (albeit rather big ones)
Or they sometimes act as publicity stunts where the OS is largely ignored anyway haha.

Something in practice like Netflix with a large, complex and performant architecture (and happens to run FreeBSD) is so much more impressive then gluing a bunch of IBM blades together and calling it "super"

Supercomputers as toys - OK, well I'll give you that one.

But if we're talking about what works in practice, let's take a look at amazon.com. My first meaningful interaction with amazon was in the late 90s as I recall. I'd gone to a site called reel.com to try to buy a movie. I entered the movie name in the search field and pressed enter. The site went catatonic, and remained unresponsive for so long that I gave up and left.

I entered the same movie name in the search field at the amazon.com site, pressed enter and instantly, a page of results was displayed, with the movie of interest at the top. I bought the movie there, I've been shopping at amazon ever since, and have always found it to be responsive. So what's the point? Well, amazon.com is a Linux shop. It works, 24/7, no matter what. I also noted at the time that reel.com was "powered" by iis on microsoft windows nt, which is a sad story in and of itself. I hadn't heard anything about reel.com since the 90s, so out of curiosity, I visited reel.com to see if it still exists. There is some sort of site there, which appears to be powered by apache. perhaps too little, too late.

What I'm saying here is that linux is perfectly at home in demanding roles. So where does that leave FreeBSD? Well, FreeBSD works too. As a Linux-like OS, it can perform as the equivalent of Linux in a lot of different scenarios.

FreeBSD fans like to boast of their epic uptimes. I've managed SLES servers that had uptimes of over 2200 days before they were decommissioned, and these boxes were not in a bubble, they were 24/7 production servers.

In summary, I will say that FreeBSD is a solid workhorse. but to imagine that FreeBSD is significantly more stable or performant than Linux in any meaningful way is to be living in the past. 1993 was a long time ago!

[nils_]

FreeBSD fans like to boast of their epic uptimes. I've managed SLES servers that had uptimes of over 2200 days before they were decommissioned, and these boxes were not in a bubble, they were 24/7 production servers.

High uptime is more of a sign of complacency on the part of the administrator since now and then a Kernel update should be done.

[david_lynch]

High uptime is more of a sign of complacency on the part of the administrator since now and then a Kernel update should be done.

Obviously you've never heard of ksplice - but no matter. If you ever have the opportunity to work in a production environment, you'll find that rebooting every time there's a kernel update available, taking down applications and inconveniencing users is frowned upon, especially when not every kernel update is even relevant to a specific server configuration and role. And then of course, it's really fun when the kernel update you thought was such a great idea ends up breaking an application.