Serving Netflix Video at 400Gbps on FreeBSD by Drew Gallatin
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it as a prime example of FreeBSD tuned for extreme network performance at massive scale.
What it is
Netflix engineer Drew Gallatin explains how Netflix serves TLS-encrypted video at 400Gb/s from a single FreeBSD server. He covers NUMA, kernel TLS, hardware TLS offload and the memory bandwidth and PCIe bottlenecks they hit.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2021 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Cites drewg123 · 2021-10 · on “NUMA Siloing in the FreeBSD Network Stack (2019) [pdf]”
This is my EuroBSDcon talk from 2 years ago. The more recent one (about getting to 400G) is up now at [this video]
Cites breakfastduck · 2022-02 · on “From macOS to FreeBSD”
I'd say being actively used to run the largest streaming service on the planet makes you pretty relevant. [this video]
Cites qwertox · 2022-08 · on “Serving Netflix Video Traffic at 800Gb/s and Beyond [pdf]”
Discussion of the same presentation 11 months ago, when the title was 400GB/s. [LINK] This was the video which was posted back then alongside the slides: [this video]
Cites voytec · 2024-09 · on “FreeBSD 13.4-Release”
Your comment suggests that FreeBSD is a thing of a past and no longer capable of "quality networking", due to poor WiFi support. I can only agree with the poor WiFi support part. But WiFi is by no means something you can judge networking stack dedicated for servers. FreeBSD was never designed for consumer hardware networking. There were a few "desktop distros" but all have more or less died, and the few FreeBSD-based "storage distros" moved to Linux after FreeBSD changed its upstream for ZFS. And I'm saying this as someone who made a lot of effort to use FreeBSD on laptop over the years, and a current user of 15.0-CURRENT on ThinkPad. But FreeBSD was and is THE choice for high-bandwidth wire