Who here uses FreeBSD in production, and what use-cases do they find it better than Linux for?
In general, the FreeBSD performance is far better for our workload (we have served up to 100Gb/s from a single-socket CDN node). In fact, I'm sitting here reading HN while watching a single-socket E5-2697A machine ramp up past 92Gb/s for a 100% TLS workload.
We've got a blog detailing a lot of our work here: https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/serving-100-gbps-from-an...
rsync.net[1] is based solely on FreeBSD.
Our cloud storage platform is based on ZFS so it's a natural choice as ZFS is a supported and mature filesystem on FreeBSD.
[1] As always, email for details about the "HN Discount".
At home, FreeBSD is used as a HTPC (Kodi), file server and backup box (it acts like a Time Machine for our Macs via netatalk and for Linux we use rsnapshot over NFS).
1. After properly setting it up, do sporadic updates when necessary without worrying that the whole thing falls appart.
Much better than Linux ;)
And through the years I learned to dislike their hive-mind approach to problems with half-baked crippled solutions that get approved and merged to production because some untouchable dev/guru/mastermind decided that he alone was a significant sample of all linux users:
- Forget about extending and improving ifconfig. Lets change everything and create a new command, afterall ifconfig is not that important,.
- Forget about your system dir layout. Lets change it and mix everything up into /
- Oops that kernel update completly screwed iptables...
- Oops that kernel update somehow introduced packet loops in the network
- Today I learned that I/O DoS is.
- wtf systemd ? Now i have to read up on this new sh*t that they are pushing down my throat. Oh wait there is no documentation.
- Don't get me started on filesystems...
Anyhow, I find Unix systems very hard to manage and maintain, i mean we do have all these devops tools to automatically manage configs and programatically setup machines in a coherent way. Linux just likes to show more than others that it exists, and does it in very inappropriate ways.
Actually, everything is put into /usr, in / you have just symlinks. And there's a reason for that.
> wtf systemd ? Now i have to read up on this new sh*t that they are pushing down my throat. Oh wait there is no documentation.
One would say, that after 8 years you would be able to find the documentation. It has manpages too.
(Yeah, it’s not perfect but the rough parts can be improved and I’m looking forward to standardization meaning we never talk about daemonization, automatic restarts, or logging again)
Do not get me wrong, I love that about FreeBSD as well. But a good GNU/Linux distro can do that, too, say, Debian or CentOS. All of the free Unix-like systems are light years ahead of Windows in terms of not spontaneously mutating and breaking things.
I always bite my tongue when people say they like Windows because it "just works", because Windows just as often "just stops" working for no discernible reason. And troubleshooting on Windows is so much more difficult, that surprisingly often, the "solution" is to wipe the system and reinstall everything.
The things I hate are:
- The anti malware service executable eating a lot of CPU
- Terrible, terrible terminal emulation even with the improved powershell window
- The crazy amount of committed memory. Even if you have 16-32 gigs of RAM, the OS still writes pagefiles to disk.
I used to hate that I couldn't customize the Desktop Environment to suit my needs. But with custom Autohotkey scripts it seems to me that sky is the limit.
The windows subsystem for linux is buggy, nevertheless it is usable and helps a great deal. Most gnu software for example Gnuapl compile and work OTB.
I've only witnessed one blue screen of death in the last month.
I should also note that I'm using an 8th gen desktop machine I've built with minimal hardware. Even with Spectre/meltdown patches I didn't experience any trouble.
BSOD-wise, Windows has been very stable for a very long time[1]. I am not a fan of Windows, but Windows crashing is a very rare event, and when it happens, in my experience the cause is either a) faulty hardware, b) buggy device drivers or c) crappy AV software mucking around in kernel space (over the last three years, almost all the Windows bluescreens I saw were due to crappy AV software). My work laptop has BSOD'd on me maybe once or twice in three years - and I am one of those people that rarely shutdown or reboot their systems. At the end of the (work) day, I put my laptop to sleep, and only reboot it when an update requires it or when it misbehaves very badly. So I am pushing the system pretty hard.
I did not have much contact with Windows 10, yet, though. My work laptop runs Windows 7, and between Windows 2000 and 8.1, Windows 7 is the one I like best, so I am sticking with it for as long as I can. WSL sounds nice, though. And I heard Windows 10 finally got a native, builtin ssh client.
> Even if you have 16-32 gigs of RAM, the OS still writes pagefiles to disk.
This one has always struck me as odd about Windows. Linux or *BSD, given enough memory, will not swap at all until you push them. Windows seems to do it "proactively". I suppose it gets less annoying with an SSD, but my work laptop has a slow 5400rpm HDD.
[1] I once saw a Windows NT 4.0 Server with six years of uptime. Personally, I shudder at the thought of a server that has not gotten any updates in years, but if that is not a concern, Windows is absolutely capable of accumulating that kind of uptime.