Maintaining the world’s fastest CDN at Netflix on FreeBSD
Maintaining the world’s fastest CDN at Netflix on FreeBSD
freebsdfoundation.org
Netflix Case Study – FreeBSD Foundation
16 comments
-
-
Fun fact: WhatsApp also used to run their servers on FreeBSD. Then Facebook bought them and now they use Linux.
-
t y
We did not make a technical choice to abandon FreeBSD in favor or something else, we made an organizational choice to abandon external hosting in favor of owned and operated hosting which required a lot of technical changes, one of which was switching operating systems.
-
-
I think Varnish can do 1Tbps with a off the shelf Linux without any special hw/firmware.
-
I wonder if the need for speed that Netflix requires has any benchmarks that compares FreeBSD with things like OpenBSD, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL and SUSE.
-
Yes. Maybe a nice one for the Phoronix website ? I'd guess that OpenBSD would not score that high. OpenBSD is cool for firewalls and servers with focus on security but not sure about speed.
-
It appears that there's a bunch of benchmarks for various flavours of BSD already there. I'm not sure how to compare these with each other and various Linux distributions in a meaningful way.
-
-
-
I would like to know why they prefer FreeBSD to Linux.
-
-
Uhm. AFAIK, you only have to share code under the GPL if you distribute binaries outside your organisation.
If it stays in-house, there's no distribution, thus no requirement to share the source.
I'm happy to be wrong, feel free to point out what I missed.
-
FreeBSD uses the BSD license: https://www.freebsd.org/internal/software-license/
-
White what you say is true, I feel like this has more to do with their engineers being better at or more comfortable with FreeBSD or something like that.
-
-
One reason is the network stack
-
Can you explain more?
-
-
16 comments
Ironically you can't use FreeBSD (or any BSD) to watch Netflix content. Even on Linux the resolution and bitrate get limited. What a fucking joke.
OSS is only good when they can save money with it, apparently
Of course it is. This is called capitalism, and it sucks.