[nycbug-talk] Switch to FreeBSD from RHEL

[Steven Kreuzer]

On Mar 6, 2009, at 11:19 AM, Matt Juszczak wrote:

> I'm currently in the middle of a data center migration project and  
> we're
> considering switching to my long time favorite OS, FreeBSD.   
> Luckily, the
> higher ups are also FreeBSD fans, but its the higher ups of the  
> higher ups
> that need convincing.
>
> While I personally feel that FreeBSD is superior in out of box  
> security,
> ease of configuration (rc.conf file, etc.), packages (ports system /
> pkg_create vs. rpm), stability and performance, etc., my opinion is
> probably very biased.  I just have a few things to ask everyone, and  
> I'd
> be hoping for some documentation to back it up if possible.
>
> 1) FreeBSD vs. Linux - I passed on the single document linked on
> bsdjobs.net that outlines the differences between the two, but I was
> hoping for something more recent and solid.  Any links?  Like I  
> said, I'm
> sold - it's convincing others.

http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/bsd4linux1.php

- SNIP -

> A) Apache - performance comparisons?  In the past, I've seen a  
> performance
> gain overall switching web's to FreeBSD from Linux.  Does this still  
> hold
> true with apache_2.x?

Take a look at accept_filter(9)

"The utility of accf_http is such that a server will not have to context
switch several times before performing the initial parsing of the
request.  This effectively reduces the amount of required CPU  
utilization
to handle incoming requests by keeping active processes in preforking
servers such as Apache low and reducing the size of the file descriptor
set that needs to be managed by interfaces such as select(), poll() or
kevent() based servers."

For whats its worth, during the 90's porn boom, most of the
sites hosting adult content ran FreeBSD because it was able to handle  
large
amounts of traffic.

However, Getting web sites to scale depends on much more then the  
underlying
operating system. Its something that I could talk about for hours  
without mentioning
the OS once.

>
> B) MySQL - In the past, I saw a performance *drop* when switching from
> Linux to FreeBSD.  pthread support enabled helped, but at the time  
> it was
> only available for 32-bit.  Some recent documentation shows that  
> FreeBSD
> 7.x with MysQL 5.0.x works well, while potentially 5.1.x may not.   
> Does
> anyone have any comments on this one? (this is probably our largest  
> fear).
> Of course, we'll do our own benchmarking before we move :) But this is
> just pre-planning questions.

Check out http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/mysql.html

> C) PHP - any performance differences?

php on FreeBSD is just as painful as it is on Linux.

>
> D) Memcache - any performance differences?

Take a look at mdcached

http://ivoras.sharanet.org/projects/mdcached.html


--
Steven Kreuzer
http://www.exit2shell.com/~skreuzer