“Traditionally, BSD has been a high-end server platform
prized for its stability, interoperability, and scalability.
These points have all come into question recently as commercial
Unix vendors such as HP and Sun tout their products as an
“enterprise solution” offering scalability superior to free systems
such as Linux and BSD.”
“OpenBSD specifically has suffered from this label, accented by
its lack of SMP support and other high-end hardware compatibility
issues. However, my investigations into OpenBSD’s use in high
traffic environments uncovered the wiretapped.net server, run by
Grant Bayley, which serves security, cryptographic, and
steganographic data to the Australian community (including the
fastest full mirror of OpenBSD in Australia). I took this machine
as a case study into OpenBSD in a datacenter scale environment, and
after speaking to Grant, I was surprised by the performance of
OpenBSD.”
“The wiretapped.net archives transmit a daily average of roughly
10GB of FTP traffic on top of Apache traffic for several domains
and a large EZ-MLM-based mailing list. This makes it one of the
largest FTP servers in Australia, yet by far the most poorly
funded. All other servers performing that kind of throughput are
large Sun servers operated by universities or corporations. The
wiretapped.net machine is a mere K-6 450Mhz/128 MB RAM machine
operating off an IDE disk archive.”