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.
Fun fact: WhatsApp also used to run their servers on FreeBSD. Then Facebook bought them and now they use Linux.
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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.
I think Varnish can do 1Tbps with a off the shelf Linux without any special hw/firmware.
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.
I would like to know why they prefer FreeBSD to Linux.
FreeBSD uses the BSD license: https://www.freebsd.org/internal/software-license/
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.
