

Ask YC:  Anyone using *BSD for hosting instead of Linux? - iamelgringo

Advantages?  Disadvantages?  Love to hear your stories.
======
andrewf
The ports system is markedly inferior IMO to Debian / Ubuntu's package
collection: no real stable tree, build from source, tweaking options at build
time is encouraged. This is a moot point for things you were going to build
from source anyway.

Niche pieces of software are absent; valgrind for FreeBSD is a fork that
doesn't support amd64 last time I checked.

There are less people out there running the exact same application binary +
underlying OS as you, which means you're less likely to find people who've had
(and solved) the same issue as you.

Using it for your desktop is a bit masochistic. Widespread virtualisation
means this isn't really an issue anymore - you can have a VM that mirrors your
production setup.

We're still using FreeBSD and aren't likely to change anytime soon. I agree
with everything aristus said.

~~~
rkts
I disagree strongly on the ports collection. I find it more flexible, up-to-
date and easy to use than Debian's packages.

~~~
andrewf
The up-to-date bit is my main issue. AFAIK the FreeBSD ports tree is never
forked into a release branch which receives security updates and nothing else.
And you'll find randomly broken stuff from time to time.

------
aristus
BSD is great, with some caveats.

Pros Stability & performance are noticeably better. BSD's virtual memory
system doesn't leave tons of pages in the Inactive bucket. The TCP stack is
the best of class, and the UFS2 filesystem rocks the house. Jails have been in
BSD more than a decade and don't waste so much $#$@ memory compared to virtual
systems. Performance under heavy load is much much better.

Cons: SMP and 64-bit support. :( Linux is the Golden Child for new hardware,
so BSD lags behind. I remember panicking my 5.1 kernel with a USB drive, as
late as 2004.

~~~
janm
64 bit support on FreeBSD is pretty good; the only real issue is being able to
compile for 32 bit targets on a 64 bit host out of the box. The ULE scheduler
improves SMP support considerably.

------
nailer
On the non-Linux front, Joyent's accelerators (on-demand scaling via
virtualization) use OpenSolaris, with the virtualization being provided by
grid containers (virtualized userspace on a shared kernel).

Joyent have a good reputation but I'm not a fan of Solaris ancient userspace
tools - something as simple as checking the size of a disk is made complex by
Solaris not bothering to include an 'h' option - so you have to count your
terabytes of disk in kilobytes.

The Solaris filesystem layout is non-FHS and a rather odd mess, with binaries
in var and etc, and variable files in usr.

------
pg
We're running FreeBSD on this server. We've never had a problem with the OS.

------
dazzawazza
I've deployed FreeBSD and OpenBSD as both front facing and back end systems.
My only complaint has been lack of SMP support (to be fixed with FreeBSD7.0 at
least, I'm not sure about OpenBSD).

People often complain about Ports but you soon get used to it and I've found
the port maintainers to be helpful on the odd occasion when there has been a
problem.

Although hardware support can be said to be weak, when choosing servers there
aren't a lot of chip sets out there so things are mostly covered. Certainly
when deploying to HP or Dell boxes I have had no problems. It only takes a few
minutes to check h/w compatibility lists. Chosing the correct servers for any
job requires careful research anyway.

The most annoying thing is explaining to people that although it's open, it's
not Linux and yes it is production ready.

~~~
janm
What is the problem you have with SMP support in FreeBSD?

------
comatose_kid
FreeBSD was my first choice, until I realized that the text-to-speech s/w only
ran on linux. There is a linux compatibility mode for BSD, but I'd rather
avoid an extra layer of complexity. So our server is running Ubuntu right now.

~~~
Shooter
You should still test BSD...we've actually had Linux software run FASTER in
linux compat mode on BSD than on native Linux. It really depends on the
software in question...

------
kogir
We're moving from CentOS/Ubuntu to FreeBSD for all our *nix boxes. The
decision was motivated by hatred acquired for CentOS over time and the fact
our systems administrator is most familiar with FreeBSD.

~~~
pstuart
What are your hate points about CentOS?

------
iamelgringo
Thanks! Great info, and reaffirms my suspicions. I've been leaning towards BSD
as a server.

Anyone have any thoughts on Linux v BSD security?

------
inovica
We are using FreeBSD for ours. We've run both Linux and FreeBSD and have a
preference for the latter for stability and speed

------
ivankirigin
Anyone using an Apple XServe?

