Re^2: OpenBSD or FreeBSD for a Perl web app Production platform?

[Anonymous Monk]

Wow. That's impressive. Thanks for sharing that! Especially the specifics of your FreeBSD setup. It helps in deciding what to try first.

You mentioned heavily loaded servers...are you talking about the number and type of services running on them, or how heavy the traffic is? Or maybe their load averages?

Your server setup sounds sweet! How much of an onslaught are your FreeBSD servers able to stand up to (might need to mention hardware specs of the server to make it meaningful, I guess)? By onslaught, I'm thinking of something like getting slammed with a "Slashdotting" or digg-type peak of server request all at once.

Thanks again! FreeBSD sure sounds n--i--c--e to my geeky heart...

[samizdat]

Actually, none of it's that impressive. That's the point. Properly tuned FreeBSD servers with spawning daemon services (such as Apache) are very capable. We separate out the MySQL and mail systems to dedicated machines (we do a lot of HTML e-mailing), and the MySQL is replicated with failover across the Internet. Likewise, the web subsystems are duplicated in several locations. We have homebrewed dynamic DNS management, which serves us well except for IE users whose crappy browsers don't obey no-cache pragmas.

What do they do well? Everything. We've had DDoS attacks, we've had load spikes, and we've had packet drops from upstream. FreeBSD has served well, with the only problems coming from admin errors, like leaving an anonymous FTP machine NFS'd to a live webserver or typing 'shutdown -h now' in the wrong terminal window.

Our machines are all Dell 1{678}50's and 850's with single or dual P3's and 1 - 2 GB of main memory. The 1x50's are all SCSI-3 with partitions and swap spread out over three disks, and the 850's are simple P3 ATA-disk machines.

We use a couple of the cheap boxes for live HDD data backups, but other than that and the system duplication, we just replace the systems with the latest low-end Dell hardware on a fairly regular basis. What we have been particular about is getting a good solid bandwidth provider. We're in One Wilshire in LA for our primary node, right next to Google and the other big guys. (www.aerioconnect.com) Clean 'Net, clean power, and good monitoring and emergency service.

[Anonymous Monk]

Quote: "Actually, none of it's that impressive. That's the point."

Indeed!

Thanks for going into the deails. The context helps.

Thanks again.