4 ms·

Its important to consider that we've poured man years into this workload on FreeBSD. Just off the top of my head, we've worked on in house, and/or contributed

Its important to consider that we've poured man years into this workload on FreeBSD. Just off the top of my head, we've worked on in house, and/or contributed to or funded, or encouraged vendors to pursue: - async sendfile (so sendfile does not block, and you don't need thread pools or AIO) - RACK and BBR TCP in FreeBSD (for good QoE) - kTLS (so you can keep using sendfile with tls, saves ~60% CPU over reading data into userspace and encrypting there) - Numa - kTLS offload (to save memory bandwidth by moving crypto to the NIC) Not to mention tons of VM system and scheduler improvements which have been motivated by our workload. FreeBSD itself has improved tremendously over the last few releases in terms of scalability

sandGorgon 5y ago
a lot of this is in Linux now right ? i am asking a personal opinion and not necessarily a "why-dont-u-move-to-linux" question. Genuinely curious on where u see state of art when it comes to Linux.
- drewg123 5y ago
  Yes. I ran it for a bake off ~2 years ago. At the time, the code in linux was pretty raw, and I had to fix a bug in their SW kTLS that caused data corruption that was visible to clients. So I worry that it was not in frequent use at the time, though it may be now. My understanding is that they don't do 0-copy inline ktls, but I could be wrong about that.
spockz 5y ago
Thank you for pushing kTLS!
webmobdev 5y ago
> FreeBSD itself has improved tremendously over the last few releases in terms of scalability True. FreeBSD (or its variants) has always been a better performer than Linux in the server segment. Before Linux became popular (mostly due to better hardware support), xBSD servers were famous for their low maintenance and high uptime (and still are). This archived page of NetCraft statistics ( https://web.archive.org/web/20040615000000*/http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html https://web.archive.org/web/20040615000000*/http://uptime.ne... ) provides an interesting glimpse into internet history of how 10+ years back, the top 50 server with the highest uptimes were often xBSD servers, and how Windows and Linux servers slowly replaced xBSD. (Here's an old HN discussion about a FreeBSD server that ran for 18 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10951220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10951220 ).

sandGorgon 5y ago

a lot of this is in Linux now right ? i am asking a personal opinion and not necessarily a "why-dont-u-move-to-linux" question. Genuinely curious on where u see state of art when it comes to Linux.

drewg123 5y ago
Yes. I ran it for a bake off ~2 years ago. At the time, the code in linux was pretty raw, and I had to fix a bug in their SW kTLS that caused data corruption that was visible to clients. So I worry that it was not in frequent use at the time, though it may be now. My understanding is that they don't do 0-copy inline ktls, but I could be wrong about that.

spockz 5y ago

Thank you for pushing kTLS!

webmobdev 5y ago

> FreeBSD itself has improved tremendously over the last few releases in terms of scalability True. FreeBSD (or its variants) has always been a better performer than Linux in the server segment. Before Linux became popular (mostly due to better hardware support), xBSD servers were famous for their low maintenance and high uptime (and still are). This archived page of NetCraft statistics ( https://web.archive.org/web/20040615000000*/http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html https://web.archive.org/web/20040615000000*/http://uptime.ne... ) provides an interesting glimpse into internet history of how 10+ years back, the top 50 server with the highest uptimes were often xBSD servers, and how Windows and Linux servers slowly replaced xBSD. (Here's an old HN discussion about a FreeBSD server that ran for 18 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10951220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10951220 ).