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

submitted 2 weeks ago by lemmyreader@lemmy.ml to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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

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[-] Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com 50 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[-] dinckelman@lemmy.world 25 points 2 weeks ago

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

[-] Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 2 weeks ago

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

[-] Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 2 weeks ago

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

[-] lemmyreader@lemmy.ml 17 points 2 weeks 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.

[-] mrlupulus@lemmy.world 6 points 2 weeks ago

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

[-] vk6flab@lemmy.radio 5 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[-] lemmyreader@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[-] vk6flab@lemmy.radio 3 points 2 weeks 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.

[-] ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 2 weeks ago

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

[+] AnnaFrankfurter@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

[deleted]

[-] turing_spider574@lemm.ee 7 points 2 weeks ago

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

[-] vk6flab@lemmy.radio 7 points 2 weeks 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.

[-] ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[-] lemmyreader@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 weeks 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.