Must admit I was interested in FreeBSD because WhatsApp were using it… but they aren’t anymore - I wonder whether there are still performance benefits to using it or whether they aren’t that great anymore?
1 Like
I watched the talk where they explain why they moved from FreeBSD, and what I understood is that when they were bought by Facebook they had to use Facebook infra which was Linux.
It’s not like they moved because there was no benefit, but because they were forced to.
I can be wrong though.
3 Likes
In the talk I watched from WhatsApp folks they had a difficult time migrating to limitations because of performance limitations of the Linux networking stack. I got the impression they would much prefer to be using FreeBSD still.
2 Likes
One of the major changes was moving from a very small number of very large FreeBSD / OTP nodes, to a very large number of IIRC 32GiB RAM Linux nodes. You can imagine the massive change in topology and traffic from this change.
You can find more info on this by looking for Maxim Federov and Anton Lavrik’s talks from various BEAM related conferences.
2 Likes