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NYCBSDCon 2014: Serving one-third of the Internet via FreeBSD

BSDTV · 13.6K views · 2014-04-06 · 1:01:39

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Overview

Scott Long of Netflix presents the architecture of the OpenConnect content delivery network at NYCBSDCon 2014. He explains why Netflix runs FreeBSD 10 on its appliances and what the future holds.

On Hacker News

Cited as the primary source for why Netflix uses FreeBSD and UFS rather than ZFS on its CDN boxes, and for its GPL reasoning.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2014–2019

Topics

Networking & internet infrastructureLinux & open-source ecosystemsDistributed systems
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netflixfreebsdopenconnectcdnzfs

What people said

m11r · 2019-02 · Reference

Pretty sure it's still UFS+J. They've mentioned in the past that the benefits of ZFS don't really apply to the CDN boxes: if a drive dies, it's simply removed from the local cache, and files are re-downloaded/redistributed as necessary across the remaining cache drives the next time the appliance refreshes from its upstream origin. Additionally, ZFS prefetching was actually less performant in some cases from what I remember -- or at least providing no benefit -- because of how it couldn't really anticipate the I/O patterns of video segment requests from users. Additional reference: - [LINK] ("…but caching is futile.") - [VIDEO]

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toomanythings2 · 2016-04 · Reference

Netflix delivers all video streaming content via FreeBSD which makes up 37% of all internet traffic. [LINK] They also contribute to FreeBSD core. It is not just an "appliance" as some people seem to want to point to. [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] In addition, a guy I met, who worked at Yahoo, told me about 25% of Yahoo still runs FreeBSD as of two years ago.

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brendangregg · 2014-11 · Reference

Scott Long has summarized it a few times, eg, from [LINK] : • Availability of expertise, outstanding community • Works well, good vendor support • No GPL • Features used: – SUJ – gmirror – boot drive only – AIO – Dtrace, HWPMC – TCP Stack, modular CC It's missing "Integrates tightly with nginx: Async I/O and sendfile()" which Scott included in [VIDEO] . In the video he elaborates a bit more about the GPL... edit: formatting

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