Yahoo! and FreeBSD[转]

  Yahoo! began life at Stanford University on a DEC Alpha box running OSF and a Sparc 20 running SunOS. They served us well for the first year, but we learned that neither system was really designed for handling a large number of HTTP requests. In fact we were unable to find any commercial system that addressed the problems we were facing with scalability. This was one of the unfortunate realities of being at the forefront of Web technology.
After leaving Stanford we used a few platforms including SGI IRIX,
Linux
, and BSDI. Not being impressed with anything wed used (in terms of performance and stability), we were still looking for alternatives. As Yahoo! grew more popular, both scalability and stability were becoming critical to our success. At the time none of us knew anything about FreeBSD, but after seeing references to it I thought Id give it a try.
Having spent many frustrating hours trying to install other PC OSs, I was a bit skeptical. I had no intention of spending three days trying to install yet another one. To my surprise I went to the FreeBSD Web site, downloaded the floppy boot image, booted a PC with the created floppy, answered a few install questions, and a few minutes later FreeBSD was installing over the Net. The real surprise was when I came back later to a fully configured system that actually worked. If anything had gone wrong with that install it would have likely been the end of that trial. Luckily for us that it was the easiest and most painless OS installs I had ever experienced.
A couple of days later we added a FreeBSD box to our cluster of Web servers. Not only did it out-perform the rest of our machines, but it was more stable. A few weeks into this experiment and we were sold. Although the price was certainly attractive, it was the stability, performance, and access to the source code that sold us. Ever since then weve used FreeBSD almost exclusively for production as well as our development environment.
Early on the two big unknowns were support issues and the future direction of FreeBSD. The support weve received from the core team as well as other users has been excellent. This support along with the source code has allowed us to solve any issues weve had almost immediately. Likewise we were pleasantly surprised with the organization and direction of the FreeBSD project as we learned more about it and the people involved over the last two years.
We started with a single Pentium100 box running FreeBSD 2.0.5. We eventually migrated the rest of our production servers to FreeBSD and today we have over 50 servers running various versions of 2.1 STABLE. We are in the process of testing 2.2 STABLE and hope to convert during the next 6 months. The machines we use range from a Pentium100 with 64MB of memory to a PPro200 with 256MB of memory. When additional I/O performance is needed we use ccd with striping over multiple disks. 100Mbps fast ethernet is used for networking. Overall an extremely cost effective solution.

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