this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2024

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Maintaining the world’s fastest CDN at Netflix on FreeBSD (freebsdfoundation.org)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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More comments https://lobste.rs/s/bwdhht/maintaining_world_s_fastest_cdn_at

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 6 months ago (1 children)

OSS is only good when they can save money with it, apparently

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago

Of course it is. This is called capitalism, and it sucks.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Fun fact: WhatsApp also used to run their servers on FreeBSD. Then Facebook bought them and now they use Linux.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028689

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

I think Varnish can do 1Tbps with a off the shelf Linux without any special hw/firmware.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I would like to know why they prefer FreeBSD to Linux.

[+] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

FreeBSD uses the BSD license: https://www.freebsd.org/internal/software-license/

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

I'd say we don't know unless we ask Netflix engineers but the comments about license look like a good one to me. Then there is in my opinion the "bloated" Linux versus the more clean BSD experience (I am a Linux user and I like to tinker with BSD sometimes). Maybe it is still true that BSD will not run on as much hardware as Linux does but have you ever compiled a custom kernel on BSD and compared it to compiling a custom kernel on Linux ? On BSD it is in comparison much easier and the documentation is usually really good.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

One reason is the network stack

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Can you explain more?