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What are some reasons for OpenBSD not being a more popular OS on web servers? I always wondered about this, as on paper OpenBSD (and FreeBSD) seem like they hav
by nikuda 15y ago
What are some reasons for OpenBSD not being a more popular OS on web servers? I always wondered about this, as on paper OpenBSD (and FreeBSD) seem like they have the edge but most server admins end up running linux. Another case of linux being slightly easier to use and doing the job well enough?
- daydream 15y agoI'm a big fan of FreeBSD/OpenBSD as server OS's. I've put OpenBSD/pf to great use as firewall machines, as they're VERY easy to configure, and the docs are most everything you need. FreeBSD has been great for general-purpose workloads. For some time OpenBSD has been regarded as "slow", in big part because it couldn't use large amounts of RAM, and it scaled across multiple cores poorly. I'm not sure if this is still the case.
- JoachimSchipper 15y ago5.0 will lift lots of memory-related limits (significant chunks of code are already in -current).
- dagw 15y agoOpenBSD has never had performance as a driving criteria, and has for long time, both justly and unjustly, been considered "slow", especially on machines with more than two CPUs, when compared to Linux and FreeBSD. Though it's been 6 years or so since I did any sort of serious large scale sysadmin work with it so I don't know if things have changed.
- JoachimSchipper 15y agoOpenBSD is not friendly to the kind of newbie who prefers HOWTOs, GUI admin tools, etc. It does have excellent man pages and tasteful text-based tools, though - e.g. http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/example1.html#allrules http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/example1.html#allrules is enough to configure a SOHO firewall.