8 ms·
In what ways is the BSD networking stack superior?
by geographomics 11y ago
In what ways is the BSD networking stack superior?
- bladerunner82 11y agoThroughput. The BSD networking stack has been very carefully engineered over time. Linux is OK, but nowhere near as robust. FreeBSD is legendary for load tolerance and network throughput, that on equal machines would choke a Linux server. Seen it, work(ed) with it. When we do something serious that requires heavy load and awesome throughput, we always lean on FreeBSD, never anything else. Everything else has always let us down.
- mixmastamyk 11y agoThat was as true ten years ago, is it still? Have there been any recent benchmarks?
- derefr 11y agoI know that a bit more recently (~4 years ago) WhatsApp emphasized that FreeBSD's networking stack was part of what allowed them to scale so cheaply. I'm sure there was a good amount of benchmarking and profiling involved in that choice, using their production workloads.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- saosebastiao 11y agoI've seen this claim before, but I've also seen the counterclaim that Linux network stacks have since caught up and even surpassed the BSDs on throughput and latency. Whether one or the other is truly better though might be irrelevant...either is such a monumental improvement over the windows networking stack that there are bound to be large benefits.
- detaro 11y agoThis is an OS for the control plane for hardware switches, so its throughput is not that important. Hardware does most of the heavy lifting.
- bladerunner82 11y agoI understand this, but was answering the question (in general) about why I believe BSD has better networking.
- Nux 11y agoHad mediocre network performance and increased load with freebsd on VMs (kvm), while at the same time a linux one would saturate a whole link.
- cyphar 11y agoWhy are you trying to get network throughput on a VM? Of course it's going to be slow, but KVM probably has some passthrough optimisations for Linux guests.
- nl 11y agoBecause that's what software defined networking is (mostly) about. In the majority of cases it's used as a way to setup a network plane for virtualized hosts. Edit: See for example why VMWare bought Nicira: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/23/vmware-buys-nicira-for-1-26-billion-and-gives-more-clues-about-cloud-strategy/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/23/vmware-buys-nicira-for-1-26...
- cyphar 11y agoI'm not a BSD guy, but I can still see it's a little unfair to compare the network throughputs of Linux and *BSD as guest VMs on a Linux host running KVM. You aren't going to get good throughout in that case without hardware passthrough (even then it's still bad). End of story.
- chris_wot 11y agoNot that I really doubt you (the FreeBSD developers have a hard won and worthy reputation in this area!) but do you have any benchmarks that help back this claim? I promise this isn't a question to try to make a point, I'm genuinely interested.
- DevOpsTiger 11y agoBenchmarks please, thank you!
- davidgerard 11y agoGot benchmark numbers on that?