2015-10-01 1:48 GMT+02:00 Rainer Duffner <[email protected]>: > >> Am 01.10.2015 um 01:22 schrieb Willy Tarreau <[email protected]>: >> >>> >> >> 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.
We are really lucky to have almost 2 production grade open source operating systems. I am really happy with my mixed infrastructure even if I have to write conditional code in my scripts. For heartbleed, all my Centos 6 were affected, my FreeBSD 8 weren't. When a nightmarish 0day occur on FreeBSD elf loader, Linux is not affected... and so on. Sometimes on critical services diversity is good for uptime and security. Joris > > 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…) > ;-) > > > > > > >
