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Can someone comment on why they use FreeBSD for content delivery (vs linux as a default choice)? Seems people use BSDs for certain high-performance tasks and I'

Can someone comment on why they use FreeBSD for content delivery (vs linux as a default choice)? Seems people use BSDs for certain high-performance tasks and I'm curious what advantages it has.

dbarlett 12y ago
As of 2012, apparently IPv6 support/performance: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2012-June/068129.html http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2012-June/...
brendangregg 12y ago
Scott Long has summarized it a few times, eg, from http://people.freebsd.org/~scottl/Netflix-BSDCan-20130515.pdf http://people.freebsd.org/~scottl/Netflix-BSDCan-20130515.pd...: • Availability of expertise, outstanding community • Works well, good vendor support • No GPL • Features used: – SUJ – gmirror – boot drive only – AIO – Dtrace, HWPMC – TCP Stack, modular CC It's missing "Integrates tightly with nginx: Async I/O and sendfile()" which Scott included in http://youtu.be/FL5U4wr86L4?t=18m30s http://youtu.be/FL5U4wr86L4?t=18m30s . In the video he elaborates a bit more about the GPL... edit: formatting
- cbsmith 12y ago
  Wouldn't you say that Linux integrates just as nicely with nginx's async I/O and sendfile support?
  - m0th87 12y ago
    I thought *BSDs used kqueue, which allegedly had worse performance at high concurrency vs Linux's epoll? EDIT: This seems to suggest kqueue may have better performance due to less syscall overhead: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~sangjin/2012/12/21/epoll-vs-kqueue.html http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~sangjin/2012/12/21/epoll-vs-kq...
    - cbsmith 12y ago
      Yeah, it's the opposite, though there are other mechanisms that could do better than epoll, but they need more refinement.
  - donavanm 12y ago
    Actually o_async is, imo, broken on linux. Forcing it to direct precludes the use of readahead or the page cache.
    - cbsmith 12y ago
      Yeah, O_ASYNC on Linux kinda sucks.

Can someone comment on why they use FreeBSD for content delivery (vs linux as a default choice)? Seems people use BSDs for certain high-performance tasks and I'm curious what advantages it has.

dbarlett 12y ago

As of 2012, apparently IPv6 support/performance: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2012-June/068129.html http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2012-June/...

brendangregg 12y ago

Scott Long has summarized it a few times, eg, from http://people.freebsd.org/~scottl/Netflix-BSDCan-20130515.pdf http://people.freebsd.org/~scottl/Netflix-BSDCan-20130515.pd...: • Availability of expertise, outstanding community • Works well, good vendor support • No GPL • Features used: – SUJ – gmirror – boot drive only – AIO – Dtrace, HWPMC – TCP Stack, modular CC It's missing "Integrates tightly with nginx: Async I/O and sendfile()" which Scott included in http://youtu.be/FL5U4wr86L4?t=18m30s http://youtu.be/FL5U4wr86L4?t=18m30s . In the video he elaborates a bit more about the GPL... edit: formatting

cbsmith 12y ago
Wouldn't you say that Linux integrates just as nicely with nginx's async I/O and sendfile support?
- m0th87 12y ago
  I thought *BSDs used kqueue, which allegedly had worse performance at high concurrency vs Linux's epoll? EDIT: This seems to suggest kqueue may have better performance due to less syscall overhead: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~sangjin/2012/12/21/epoll-vs-kqueue.html http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~sangjin/2012/12/21/epoll-vs-kq...
  - cbsmith 12y ago
    Yeah, it's the opposite, though there are other mechanisms that could do better than epoll, but they need more refinement.
- donavanm 12y ago
  Actually o_async is, imo, broken on linux. Forcing it to direct precludes the use of readahead or the page cache.
  - cbsmith 12y ago
    Yeah, O_ASYNC on Linux kinda sucks.