Klara Systems is a consultancy that writes technical articles on FreeBSD and OpenZFS, covering jails, VNET, bhyve and BSD history.
HN links its articles as references on FreeBSD network virtualization and ZFS compression, and commenters cite its clients' praise for its ZFS expertise.
> I doubt a highly tuned Linux box will be slower than the equivalent FreeBSD one.
That tracks but there's been a lot of work being done on FreeBSD's stack as well.
Most people are aware about the contributions Netflix has made to FreeBSD; they say their FreeBSD-based CDN streams terabytes per second [1].
In addition to the basic network stack, FreeBSD can load additional stacks like RACK TCP [2] stack (using Recent ACK, PRR, etc.) that can be loaded as a module and selected per-socket or as the system default. This is the re-written stack that Netflix uses after they helped develop it.
It seems that FreeBSD is kind of a testbed for new network implementations like Netgraph [3], a graph-based networking subsystem that enables modular, real-time packet processing inside the kernel and Network Offload and Socket Splicing (SO_SPLICE) [4] that enables kernel-level TCP proxying, resulting in reduced CPU overhead and eliminating unnecessary data copies.
I'm not usually into networking but this stuff sounds very interesting.
[1]: "Case Study: Maintaining the World’s Fastest Content Delivery Network at Netflix on FreeBSD" - https://freebsdfoundation.org/netflix-case-study/ (PDF).
[2]: "The RACK-TLP Loss Detection Algorithm for TCP" - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8985
[3]: "Inside FreeBSD Netgraph: Behind the Curtain of Advanced Networking" - https://klarasystems.com/articles/inside-freebsd-netgraph-advanced-networking/
[4]:…
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> What companies have actually found is that collaborating on OSS infrastructure projects is extremely beneficial, essentially outsourcing some of the work to focus more on their unique selling points.
I think there are examples of this in FreeBSD: after a company effectively forked the project, FreeBSD kept rolling forward—with bug fixes, updated drivers, etc. The company(s) had to maintain larger and larger internal diffs to get all of these improvements.
At some point they tended to just start giving back whatever wasn't their secret sauce and keep their own code as self-contained as possible. I think a popular workflow nowadays is to just track -CURRENT [1], and maybe branch when they cut a release of their own product.
[1] https://klarasystems.com/articles/evaluating-freebsd-current-for-production-use/
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As a provider of open-source services, Klara focuses on the art of open software and community-driven development. We believe that in order to foster creativity and advance technology in an ethical fashion we must continue fueling the spirit of open source.
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For movies/pictures and sound (well everything that is already compressed) you can deactivate it, zle too.
EDIT: On the other hand leave it on, zfs tests the file if it's compress-able..if not it makes nothing:
https://klarasystems.com/articles/openzfs1-understanding-transparent-compression/
>>ZFS Compression, Incompressible Data and Performance
>>You may be tempted to set “compression=off” on datasets which primarily have incompressible data on them, such as folders full of video or audio files. We generally recommend against this – for one thing, ZFS is smart enough not to keep trying to compress incompressible data, and to never store data compressed, if doing so wouldn’t save any on-disk blocks.
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