Where did you see that WhatsApp is converting to Linux? At MeetBSD Rick Reed claimed they had full autonomy from Facebook on that kind of thing (http://www.slideshare.net/iXsystems/rick-reed-600-m-unsuspec...), and FB was looking at them to learn how they did so much with so little engineers and servers.

Netflix is doing 100Gbit HTTP and > 60Gbit HTTPS on a single socket Xeon E5 with FreeBSD. These servers are about 1/3 North American Internet by volume. In comparison to OCA team their AWS team sounds like a total tire fire to me in terms of engineer count and monthly spend.

I run the OS team at Limelight Networks, one of the largest CDNs. We can peak beyond 10Tbit/s on our current network and have to deal with a more demanding/unknown workload compared to NF OCA. This is all courtesy of FreeBSD. My entire management chain agrees that the cost of entry is lower to influencing and driving development in FreeBSD vs other kernels, and we collaborate with the other well known players on projects that are mutually beneficial such as TCP and filesystems.

Companies switching from FreeBSD to Linux usually are victim of the decision from bad VP-level management looking for a scapegoat rather than solving actual business and culture problems. Yahoo began transitioning to RHEL in 2005 and AFAIK are still at least two years from conceivably being off of FreeBSD. A 12 year _free_ OS transition is an embarrassing use of engineering effort and total management failure.

There are a lot of companies satisfied with FreeBSD, especially in the appliance space and small business, but they are not vocal because it just works and is often rebranded.

Based on your HN username, you're probably not the guy who did the presentation at BSDCan 2015 on the topic of "FreeBSD Operations at Limelight Networks, An Overview of Operating at Internet Scale". Regardless, that was a good and influential presentation, worth the time to google and watch.

I think that specific presentation would answer a lot of OPs questions, probably faster and more accurately than a web discussion board. I got a lot of good ideas from that presentation about freebsd deployment at my workplace. Specifically I seem to recall something along the lines of, its 2016 so start using zabbix instead of nagios, which was pretty good advice, or at least its been interesting to experiment with so far.

I'd extend the remarks from the presentation that much as its possible to write Perl in any language, its possible to do everything linux-style but with a freebsd kernel, whereas the real benefits grow when things start smelling more freebsd-ish and less linux-ish. For example the *bsds are much closer to the proven successful unix philosophy of architecture and design, whereas the linuxes in general have been slowly generally moving away from that successful architecture.

I'd throw out a semi-dissenting opinion that freebsd use is much like whiteboard algo interview questions... even if it has nothing to do with the job or problem, the folks who can do it, are of a class above the folks who can't, so naturally the average freebsd admin being considerably more inherently skilled than the average linux admin results in freebsd deployments requiring 1/10th the number of sysadmin-hours etc etc. There are actual technical improvements and architectural benefits to freebsd, but the main contributor of the often reported 10x benefit to freebsd is the skill, experience, and raw horsepower of the generally superior users. If freebsd were as popular as linux, that would disappear and freebsd users would only be maybe 2x as productive as linux instead of the existing 10x figures. Naturally the guy writing a playbook for ansible will be much more productive than the guy trying to use the gnome GUI to do sysadmin-ish stuff, but there's nothing inherently bsd-ish or linux-ish about it.

(edited to add, yes, i336_, that is exactly the video I recommend)

The landing page for that link: https://www.bsdcan.org/2015/schedule/events/534.en.html

Video part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l2rlRjkGhk

Video part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1-ZyiY5z48

The above two videos cued up in a giant "BSDCan" playlist, as linked from the first page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l2rlRjkGhk&list=PLWW0CjV-Ta...

Most interesting, thanks for commenting. This phrase caught my eye...

"My entire management chain agrees that the cost of entry is lower to influencing and driving development in FreeBSD vs other kernels [...]"

Is that simply a reflection of the smaller size of the FreeBSD project or does it stem from the 'tight core' model where the kernel and base system are co-developed?

Both..

Facebook advertised "write your own ticket" not so long ago for Linux kernel developers. You are guaranteed to be going up against Google if you want Linux kernel talent that has significant influence. Xref Dan Luu's http://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/ and multiply by 2 to see how much that will cost you. This kind of thing even lures ardent FreeBSD people away, for instance Justin Gibbs, President and Founder of The FreeBSD Foundation currently works at Facebook.. there are many other BSD people stuck in the Borg too.

Aside from that, the tight core and stable ABIs and KPIs are much nicer to base things like an appliance off of that may have a long development and longer support lifecycle on. I do some firmware hacking and analysis sometimes for fun, and Linux firmware are always abhorrent in terms of security, quality, license compliance. IBM's disk storage subsystems as one example. I really can't fathom why anyone would base a closed source product on Linux other than wanton incompetence, and I'm not throwing that with tongue in cheek nor lightheartedly.

What are your thoughts on the 2.5 year support windows for "Extended Support" releases?

(I have a view here, but I don't want to bias your response one way or another).

IMHO If you are doing a product, you should be doing your own RelEng and support. It takes about two engineers for good coverage.

And your internal releng process should be handling security issues as they come up?

That may start to get rough with MFCs as the branch petrifies, but yes it should fall within the same crosschecked two engineer budget for a reasonable time span. You should seek commit bits to maintain said branches if you rely on them, because you're probably not alone.

FreeBSD is switching to a 5 year window.

For point releases? Or for ABI compatibility?

Edit: Went digging. Here's the link: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2015-Fe...

It's for ABI compatibility.

It certainly adds a certain amount of certainty to the planning process. Right now, I'm running off 11.0-CURRENT in preparation for a deployment or around August 2016, which gives me certainty of support until mid-2021.

Are you doing HW that is frozen in time? I would suggest that many things should be branch rebased roughly every two years unless there are extreme circumstances. I think EMC Isilon has recently realized this as example.

> Netflix is doing 100Gbit HTTP and > 60Gbit HTTPS on a single socket Xeon E5 with FreeBSD. These servers are about 1/3 North American Internet by volume. In comparison to OCA team their AWS team sounds like a total tire fire to me in terms of engineer count and monthly spend.

Have any idea how many cores and what kind of network hardware they use push those impressive figures? I would guess there is some network offload involved, as this comparable to memory bandwidth of a single core of that Xeon if I'm not mistaken.

For those numbers, it was around 18 real cores with hyper threading enabled. Crypto is a great workload for hyper threads. These systems are currently being built up and aren't yet in production. These are with last year's CPUs.

https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/hardware/ has the currently deployed system specs.

There's a little bit of detail in this press release from Mellanox: http://ir.mellanox.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=959350

Thx, I cant edit my original post, but my intention / worry was if FreeBSD get enough cooperate usage that is being sustainable in the long term future. Looks like it is doing fine for now.

Off-Topic: No idea why Limelight fell off my CDN radar long time ago, ( I got focused on EdgeCast instead ), since Limelight seems not want to list their price in /GB pricing ( Likely an Enterprise Only Strategy ), any chance for a different sub brand that offer something similar to CDN in pay per use cases?

As far as I understand, we are more handshake deal based. A lot of our traffic is special events where a customer blows up the Internet for a day and needs a lot of help in mitigating problems from that.

A bif off-topic, what do you think about this: http://lukewolf.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/a-prediction-2020-yea...

Honestly, meh. I was moderately early to the Linux game (1998) and bandwagon really didn't do proportional good. I use FreeBSD because I can understand and influence it.

Netflix delivers all video streaming content via FreeBSD which makes up 37% of all internet traffic. https://openconnect.itp.netflix.com/software/ They also contribute to FreeBSD core. It is not just an "appliance" as some people seem to want to point to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sZZN8Szh14

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP_bKvXkoC4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL5U4wr86L4

In addition, a guy I met, who worked at Yahoo, told me about 25% of Yahoo still runs FreeBSD as of two years ago.

Sony's Playstation 3 & 4 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_system_software and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4_system_software.

Playstations run a very heavily modified and locked down version of FreeBSD.

PS3 did—I believe PS4 is not nearly as heavily modified[1]. It is certainly locked down though, at least after the early PS3s where you could, say, install Linux and build a HPC cluster[2].

1. Mostly from people who've hacked it; https://cturt.github.io/ps4.html seems to suggest it's a relatively stock FreeBSD kernel with some added system calls and a possibly heavily modified NetBSD userland.

2. http://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercompute...

Juniper's Junos OS is based on FreeBSD.

Honest question though: Does the popularity of an OS really tell us anything useful? I often use the "if it's popular, it's probably good" metric, but I know I am just being lazy...

As a curiosity, knowing the "rank" of an OS is interesting, but if I am making any important decisions, I research the OS myself, hopefully disregarding outside influences.

I am not really concern about popularity, but the development side of it. Or, can the current size of usage / ecosystem be sustainable for FreeBSD long term development? Cooperate usage will at least paid for the development in Linux, I was just worried FreeBSD usage is shrinking because of this.

You will find FreeBSD inside every major internet giant, it is not used for everything but for corner issues where FreeBSD is better than for example Linux. There are many examples, one is that the Linux kernel VM system is not performing as well when memory is over-committed.

Groupon uses FreeBSD for databases internally - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQx_dJIG-sg

But it's not just software giants, a surprising number of hardware devices and companies use BSD too. I'd bet neither your self-driving car nor your doctor's medical devices run linux. The CDN you're reading this from... probably not linux either and probably not the routers sending the traffic either. Your cell phone GSM network isn't running atop a linux distro.

WhatsApp for one: http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp-archi...

"So who is using BSD?"

rsync.net is based solely on FreeBSD and has been since 2006.

Not sure if we're Internet giants, though.

Yahoo began their migration from BSD to Linus around 2010. Long before Marisa.

Yahoo still has FreeBSD and some FreeBSD devs, but the focus isn't on FreeBSD anymore