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.
Because FreeBSD uses MIT license whereas GNU/Linux uses GPLv2. The difference between them is that with GPLv2 you have to share source code if you modify anything but in MIT license you can change anything you want and charge ppl and not share source code. That’s why a lot of corps like to use FreeBSD. I know that Netflix contributes to FreeBSD but I’m also sure they hide a lot of things.
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.
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.
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.
FreeBSD uses the BSD license: https://www.freebsd.org/internal/software-license/
One reason is the network stack
I think Varnish can do 1Tbps with a off the shelf Linux without any special hw/firmware.
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.
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.
