Timothy – was that… sarcastic? I can’t tell if my answer was useful to you or if I’m missing the mark.

Fantastic post. Can’t say thanks enough for all you do.

I’m really looking forward to reading about your benchmarking vs other BSD and the result.

So much has been improved in 4.x yet I haven’t come across many general benchmarks of Dragonfly vs other BSD … except for the outdated 3.2 benchmarks

https://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance/

For short lived connections, e.g. 1 request/connection HTTP/1.1 workload w/ 1KB web object, 2x2620v2 w/ dual 82599, Dfly can do 207Krequests/s, average latency is 50ms, latency stdev is ~80ms, @30K concurrent connections. Plain TCP connection/accept rate is ~480Kconnections/s on the hw configuration I mentioned above; it is improved a bit recently w/ Matt’s VM work.

Last time I measured, Dfly need to use 16KB web object to saturate 20Gbps network w/ 1 requests/connection and @30K concurrent connections; 8KB web object fails to saturate the 20Gbps network under the same condition.

IPv4 forwarding rate is ~5Mpps (only counts RXed packets on both ends), w/ 400+ routes in routing table w/o fastforwarding.

I will do some measurement on FreeBSD-current and Linux (ubuntu 16.10 probably), for my talk on AsiaBSDCon.

Your comment was super helpful

The other question is Erlang. I don’t use it, but in theory whatever is in FreeBSD ports should be in DragonFly dports. That should be easy to evaluate based on looking at whatever libraries and versions of code you have in place.

Last – and this is the advantage of DragonFly for me – is that it’s a small group of developers who are generally friendly. You are likely to be able to talk to someone about problems if you have them, but there’s no guarantee (with this or any other open source project) that there’s someone who can help you with a specific problem; we’re all volunteers. I’m sure this is not a surprise to you; I’m mentioning it cause it’s important.

That’s 6.3B *daily* request.

The charateristics of our platforms is

– averaging ~18M concurrent users.

– processing ~6.3B network requests. With an average payload of 21kb

====

– FreeBSD & erlang.

I don’t know what your company does or your goals are or anything about your business other than it’s possibly tech-related. It is very hard to recommend anything to you based on that.

If you are indeed fact-based and as the CTO of a new company responsible for the technology direction of the company, you should have some test cases in mind.

With all due respect, I try to base my decisions on Facts and Data.

The trouble I’m having with DragonFly in general, and your post above is a great example of this, is that people say it’s better “just because”. But you don’t give any concrete examples HOW it’s actually better.

Yes, Dillon & Marino are awesome.

But back to Facts & Data, what specifically makes DragonFly better

– if it’s more performant, where can I read up on those benchmarks (and I don’t mean the benchmarks on the website from 4 years ago)

– does it have functionality that the other BSDs don’t? If so what?

– does it support more hardware than the other BSDs? Etc

The trouble I have is that it’s unclear what goal DragonFly is trying to address.

OpenBSD focuses on security. NetBSD focuses on cross platform support. FreeBSD feature completeness and performance.

What is DragonFly?

Please don’t read my comment as being negative.

I’m just expressing candid feedback in that I’ve read quite a bit about DragonFly and people say it’s “better” but don’t give concrete data support How it’s exactly better … other than simply saying the developers are superior.

For me Dragonfly beats FreeBSD because of Dillon+Marino. DragonflyBSD has some amazing devs but these two, especially, are nonFreeBSD commiters, simply because they are banned from FreeBSD.

Dragonfly is more K.I.S.S than FreeBSD, Dragonfly is more about performance at the end and simplicity from the start, while other BSDs, especially FreeBSD, are more about politics.

So I’m the CTO & co-founder of an early stage startup. A portion of my job is understanding when to use the best tools and what those tools are.

Since my company is young, I have the benefit of changing the OS we use (which is currently FreeBSD).

I keep hearing DragonFly is excellent but haven’t heard exactly *why*.

Given that I’m already invested in the mindset of BSD, a single distribution that contains with the kernel and userland … what merits does DragonFly have that should cause me to switch from FreeBSD to DragonFly?

Thanks in advance.