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Serving Netflix Video at 400Gbps on FreeBSD by Drew Gallatin

EuroBSDCon · 9.5K views · 2021-09-27 · 47:42

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Overview

Netflix engineer Drew Gallatin explains how Netflix serves TLS-encrypted video at 400Gb/s from a single FreeBSD server. He covers NUMA, kernel TLS, hardware TLS offload and the memory bandwidth and PCIe bottlenecks they hit.

On Hacker News

HN cites it as a prime example of FreeBSD tuned for extreme network performance at massive scale.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2021–2024

Topics

Networking & internet infrastructureOperating systems & kernelsSoftware performance & optimization
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freebsdnetflixktlsnuma400gbps

What people said

voytec · 2024-09 · Reference

Your comment suggests that FreeBSD is a thing of a past and no longer capable of "quality networking", due to poor WiFi support. I can only agree with the poor WiFi support part. But WiFi is by no means something you can judge networking stack dedicated for servers. FreeBSD was never designed for consumer hardware networking. There were a few "desktop distros" but all have more or less died, and the few FreeBSD-based "storage distros" moved to Linux after FreeBSD changed its upstream for ZFS. And I'm saying this as someone who made a lot of effort to use FreeBSD on laptop over the years, and a current user of 15.0-CURRENT on ThinkPad. But FreeBSD was and is THE choice for high-bandwidth wired networking. Netflix is both an early adopter and an active contributor to FreeBSD's networking codebase. They hack FreeBSD[0] to achieve cool numbers over and over[1][2]. Intel's device mentioned by you - AX200 - works "fine" on my ThinkPad, for a few months now. The device was on supported hardware list for more than a year prior, but the actual driver wasn't covering all vendor/device id pairs (different flavors of hardware or behavior all known as "the same" chip; this is a major problem with consumer devies since chip outages started). That said, by "fine" I mean that I can use the card and finally can connect to 5GHz networks and avoid disruptions related to 2.4GHz congestion. But FreeBSD is still incapable of utilizing speeds offered by modern WiFi specifications. Even with 5GHz co

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qwertox · 2022-08 · Reference

Discussion of the same presentation 11 months ago, when the title was 400GB/s. [LINK] This was the video which was posted back then alongside the slides: [VIDEO]

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breakfastduck · 2022-02 · Reference

I'd say being actively used to run the largest streaming service on the planet makes you pretty relevant. [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by EuroBSDCon, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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