Serving Netflix Video at 400Gb/s on FreeBSD

[drhowarddrfine]

HN Link

The slides are good to go through but the comments on this page are interesting and great by Drew from Netflix. Someone asked

Was FreeBSD your first choice? Or did you try with Linux first?

Drew replied:

FreeBSD was selected at the outset...We did a bake off a few years ago, and FOR THIS WORKLOAD FreeBSD outperformed Linux.

Its important to consider that we've poured man years into this workload on FreeBSD. Just off the top of my head, we've worked on in house, and/or contributed to or funded, or encouraged vendors to pursue: - async sendfile (so sendfile does not block, and you don't need thread pools or AIO) - RACK and BBR TCP in FreeBSD (for good QoE) - kTLS (so you can keep using sendfile with tls, saves ~60% CPU over reading data into userspace and encrypting there) - Numa - kTLS offload (to save memory bandwidth by moving crypto to the NIC)
Not to mention tons of VM system and scheduler improvements which have been motivated by our workload.

FreeBSD itself has improved tremendously over the last few releases in terms of scalability

And more insight and high praise of FreeBSD throughout.

 

[Beastie7]

You gotta love some of the commenters attempts to snide at or downplay FreeBSD's success with Netflix. Stallman trolls never give up.

 

[mrbeastie0x19]

You gotta love some of the commenters attempts to snide at or downplay FreeBSD's success with Netflix. Stallman trolls never give up.

I found them surprisingly quite mature! Some of the comments on sites like these the irony is really not lost on them. They speak of other systems like Microsoft did of Linux years ago, like the popularity has anything to do with its value...