3 ms·

I have no stats in front of me, but I have always been made to understand that BSD's (namely FreeBSD) handle high traffic better than linux. I personally use D

by rsayers 17y ago

I have no stats in front of me, but I have always been made to understand that BSD's (namely FreeBSD) handle high traffic better than linux. I personally use Debian for everything. I can't imagine the distro making a huge difference really. I've used Debian as a desktop os for some time, so when I needed a server os, it was easy to get going quickly. Switching from Apache to Nginx made more of a difference in my case than anything else I could have done I believe.

tptacek 17y ago
I don't know FreeBSD vs. Linux (and god do I ever not want to see that one hashed out), but let me assure you based on significant commercial experience in performance-critical apps that the other BSDs are not the way to go here. You're working against the grain if you go BSD instead of Linux with Rails, whether you like FreeBSD or not.
SwellJoe 17y ago
but I have always been made to understand that BSD's (namely FreeBSD) handle high traffic better than linux For the past several years, and up until FreeBSD 7 you've always been seriously misled. FreeBSD has historically had dramatically worse performance in most concurrent server applications (certainly in multi-process SMP workloads). As of FreeBSD 7, it generally is the equal or slight better of Linux. It is not better in enough categories or by a large enough margin for anyone to say with confidence that a particular workload will perform better on FreeBSD or Linux. One would always have to benchmark the actual application, and the differences would be minimal in most cases...and with every new kernel release, you'd have to benchmark again, because things change and performance advantages might flip from one release to the next. And, tptacek is correct, none of the other BSDs has inherited these dramatic performance improvements found in FreeBSD 7, so they are very unlikely to provide better performance than any modern Linux version on modern multi-core hardware.

by rsayers 17y ago

tptacek 17y ago

I don't know FreeBSD vs. Linux (and god do I ever not want to see that one hashed out), but let me assure you based on significant commercial experience in performance-critical apps that the other BSDs are not the way to go here. You're working against the grain if you go BSD instead of Linux with Rails, whether you like FreeBSD or not.

SwellJoe 17y ago

but I have always been made to understand that BSD's (namely FreeBSD) handle high traffic better than linux For the past several years, and up until FreeBSD 7 you've always been seriously misled. FreeBSD has historically had dramatically worse performance in most concurrent server applications (certainly in multi-process SMP workloads). As of FreeBSD 7, it generally is the equal or slight better of Linux. It is not better in enough categories or by a large enough margin for anyone to say with confidence that a particular workload will perform better on FreeBSD or Linux. One would always have to benchmark the actual application, and the differences would be minimal in most cases...and with every new kernel release, you'd have to benchmark again, because things change and performance advantages might flip from one release to the next. And, tptacek is correct, none of the other BSDs has inherited these dramatic performance improvements found in FreeBSD 7, so they are very unlikely to provide better performance than any modern Linux version on modern multi-core hardware.