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A comment on Netflix begins the deployment of their own content delivery network.

Re:Netflix begins the deployment of their own content delive... by mef on Wednesday June 06, 2012 @04:52PM (#4076160)
From https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/software:

Operating System

For the operating system, we use FreeBSD version 9.0. This was selected for its balance of stability and features, a strong development community and staff expertise. We will contribute changes we make as part of our project to the community through the FreeBSD committers on our team.

Web server

We use the nginx web server for its proven scalability and performance. Netflix audio and video is served via HTTP.

Routing intelligence proxy

We use the BIRD Internet routing daemon to enable the transfer of network topology from ISP networks to the Netflix control system that directs clients to sources of content.

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Re:Netflix begins the deployment of their own content delive... by patrickgzill on Wednesday June 06, 2012 @06:21PM (#4076510)
They are probably using ZFS also. (my guess)
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Re:Netflix begins the deployment of their own content delive... by amalag on Wednesday June 06, 2012 @06:40PM (#4076570)
Is ZFS stable enough on FreeBSD? Seems to be an unofficial port.
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Re:Netflix begins the deployment of their own content delive... by Dobbs on Wednesday June 06, 2012 @07:14PM (#4076696)
ZFS is very stable on recent versions of FreeBSD, I can't speak for older versions as I don't have experience. I at least haven't had any issues with it and we use it in production.

It is an older version and not as feature complete as what you will find in Solaris.

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Re:Netflix begins the deployment of their own content delive... by duaneb on Wednesday June 06, 2012 @07:30PM (#4076746)
ZFS is very stable on FreeBSD.
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Re:Netflix begins the deployment of their own content delive... by awaythrow on Wednesday June 06, 2012 @07:55PM (#4076814)
But you need a lot of extra RAM compared to the usual filesystems. Is that correct? If yes, is using ZFS worth the cost of the extra RAM?
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Re:Netflix begins the deployment of their own content delive... by gauravk92 on Wednesday June 06, 2012 @10:12PM (#4077260)
You don't need the extra ram. ZFS uses it as a cache, more ram, more cache. That's about it, otherwise it doesn't use much ram.
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Re:Netflix begins the deployment of their own content delive... by cdawzrd on Wednesday June 06, 2012 @09:40PM (#4077152)
ZFS doesn't use that much RAM if you don't turn on deduplication, which is of less use in a system that serves large compressed video files than one that handles tons of read/write traffic as an office file server.
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Re:Netflix begins the deployment of their own content delive... by duaneb on Wednesday June 06, 2012 @10:48PM (#4077366)
RAM is not required; it just makes lookup faster with caching.
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Re:Netflix begins the deployment of their own content delive... by wanderr on Thursday June 07, 2012 @10:26PM (#4082324)
Why would they use ZFS on a CDN? IIRC, ZFS has some performance characteristics that would make it a poor choice for something like caching data on a network edge when it's really designed for ensuring data integrity.
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