> Am 01.10.2015 um 01:22 schrieb Willy Tarreau <w...@1wt.eu>: > >> > > I'd be tempted to place my judgement between yours and Jeff's. I'd say > that if the company is already using the target OS on any other place, > the cost of switching is low. If the load balancer is the opportunity > to introduce a new OS, it's a bad idea. By nature a load balancer is > very OS-dependant, and has bugs. Sometimes it's not trivial to tell > if a bug is in haproxy or the underlying OS until you get network > traces and/or strace output (BTW as far as I know, strace still doesn't > support amd64 on FreeBSD). Mixing the two can cast a bad image on the > new OS just because admins will initially not know well how to tune it > for the load and to ensure stability, will not easily troubleshoot > tricky issues, and a lot of frustration will result from this. >
Probably. But OP’s admin will have his reasons for wanting FreeBSD in the picture. My guess would be that FreeBSD is the OS he’s more familiar with debugging. FreeBSD has ktrace - and dtrace (if you know how to use it, that is…) Here, most of our LBs run HAproxy on FreeBSD. Sometimes, they’re not. Because…reasons ;-) Why? Well, historically, most LBs and reverse-proxies ran FreeBSD (with NGINX). So it was more or less a „natural“ choice, with some pushing from my side (cough). FreeBSD has CARP. Linux has keepalived. etc. I don’t think we’ll ever get so much traffic that either one will be superior to the other. And I seriously doubt OP will. FreeBSD 10.1 has most of the optimizations that Netflix uses turned-on out of the box - but they do file-serving with NGINX. In their (extreme) case, it works better. Proxying/load-balancing is a bit different. I like FreeBSD because I can get a very stable, simple, low overhead, no-nonsense OS with a reasonable shelf-live and update-cycle while still being able to get up-to-date packages directly from upstream. > You should expect roughly the same performance on both OS so that is > not a consideration for switching or not switching. Really keep in > mind the admin cost, the cost of it being the exception in all your > system and possibly different debugging tools. It's very likely that > it will not be a problem, but better be aware of this. > That’s what you get by hiring a FreeBSD guy. If OP had hired a CentOS guy, I bet he'd want to switch everything to CentOS (or even Atomic Server…) ;-)
