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Why does WhatsApp use FreeBSD?

#freebsd#whatsapp
Benjamin-Philip

Benjamin-Philip

Why does WhatsApp use FreeBSD?

In every WhatsApp “success story” article, I notice that they all mention that WhatsApp runs FreeBSD.

I don’t see what is advantage of running FreeBSD compared to running some mainstream Linux distro like some Debian derivitiave or RHEL. It seems to me that documentation and support will be somewhat worse for FreeBSD.

11 comments
#freebsd
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al2o3cr

al2o3cr

+1 for this - folks spend a lot of time trying to discover deep technical reasons for decisions that often come down to “we need to use SOMETHING and our CEO has deep experience deploying WHATEVER_THING so let’s use that”.

The other popular-but-often-overlooked reason is “because implementing it was a hassle and the person who was willing to do it wanted to use WHATEVER_THING because it was shiny”; for instance, the choice of Scala over other JVM languages at Twitter for performance-critical parts.

5
Post #10
AstonJ

AstonJ

Why does WhatsApp use FreeBSD?

They don’t :lol:

As mentioned by others they moved to Linux. There have been a few threads about it, think this was one of the most recent:

You may also be interested in:

5
Post #12
tj0

tj0

During the 2000’s, FreeBSD had a more performant tcp stack and many high-traffic websites used it. Considering that Whatsapp ran on a small set of big servers, picking FreeBSD certainly doesn’t seem out of line. I’m not sure if Linux tcp stack has ever surpassed it. For instance, Netflix still uses FreeBSD to serve video.

https://papers.freebsd.org/2022/eurobsdcon/gallatin-the_other_freebsd_optimizations-netflix/
https://papers.freebsd.org/2021/eurobsdcon/gallatin-netflix-freebsd-400gbps/

4
Post #11
victorbjorklund

victorbjorklund

They seem to have moved away from that in order to fit better in with the rest of meta. > WhatsApp moved away from FreeBSD to Linux. I'm a former WhatsApp server engine... | Hacker News

See also this thread on running elixir on FreeBSD vs Linux. Linux vs FreeBSD for Phoenix? - #12 by Mandemus

2
Post #2
JeyHey

JeyHey

FreeBSD is a great system. I’m running one since 7 years and had no problems.

The main reason, thought, might be that Jan Koum was a FreeBSD expert.

2
Post #3

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