Netflix operates on FreeBSD servers equipped with AMD Epyc CPUs and achieves roughly 400 Gbit/s per server.

Discussion in 'Frontpage news' started by Hilbert Hagedoorn, Sep 21, 2021.

  1. Hilbert Hagedoorn

    Hilbert Hagedoorn Don Vito Corleone Staff Member

    Messages:
    48,389
    Likes Received:
    18,560
    GPU:
    AMD | NVIDIA
    SamuelL421 and tunejunky like this.
  2. Stairmand

    Stairmand Master Guru

    Messages:
    374
    Likes Received:
    186
    GPU:
    RTX3090 Aorus Maste
    Always surprises me that they don't make specific content delivery systems for video, rather than rely on off-the-shelf parts. As they don't need general compute, but just video encode/decode and high raw bandwidth seems weird?
     
  3. Loobyluggs

    Loobyluggs Ancient Guru

    Messages:
    5,219
    Likes Received:
    1,589
    GPU:
    RTX 3060 12GB
    [insert picture of Homer Simpson drooling]
     
    tunejunky likes this.
  4. Francesco

    Francesco Guest

    Messages:
    109
    Likes Received:
    45
    GPU:
    Sapphire 4870
    Someone would need to design and build hardware for such specific workloads... and that would mean selling it in very limited quantities… it would be very expensive, probably not less expensive than the current solution.
     
    tunejunky likes this.

  5. Stairmand

    Stairmand Master Guru

    Messages:
    374
    Likes Received:
    186
    GPU:
    RTX3090 Aorus Maste
    True, but it's a growing market, and it's not like a Epic CPU and 250GB RAM setup is a bargain!
     
  6. Kaarme

    Kaarme Ancient Guru

    Messages:
    3,513
    Likes Received:
    2,355
    GPU:
    Nvidia 4070 FE
    Nah, that's probably a bargain enough. Remember that it's for business. As long as your business generates revenue, which Netflix does, you can deduct investments from taxes. This is the huge difference between private consumers and business enterprises. Often businesses can't even afford to look for bargains because they need reliability. For example, a contract manufacturer in continental East Asia might make tools that would only last a month in serious use, but the factory itself requires quality tools to avoid production delays. The real question mark about the Netflix Epyc system would be the power use compared to specialised hardware.
     
    tunejunky likes this.
  7. tunejunky

    tunejunky Ancient Guru

    Messages:
    4,345
    Likes Received:
    2,988
    GPU:
    7900xtx/7900xt
    not too long ago i was talking about Epyc's immediate market penetration in The Valley.
    i was laughed at.
    but being as the ones laughing didn't live and work in Silicon Valley as i do, i didn't hold their ignorance against them.
    yes Epyc trails Xeon for legacy based systems and in less demanding industries than computing. but in new systems and where high density, low power performance is required
    (like super-computers, streaming, pharmaceuticals, oil, and cloud, etc...) there is no substitute for Epyc nor will there be for the next five years.
     
  8. richto

    richto Guest

    Messages:
    114
    Likes Received:
    11
    GPU:
    2 x 7900GX2 GTX DUOs in Quad SLi
    Surprised they don't use Windows Server for that as its enterprise network drivers tend to be way better than *nix ones with better throughput at lower CPU use. I guess they don't want to pay for an OS.
     
  9. SamuelL421

    SamuelL421 Master Guru

    Messages:
    271
    Likes Received:
    198
    GPU:
    RTX 4090 / RTX 5000
    Embra and tunejunky like this.
  10. MaCk0y

    MaCk0y Maha Guru

    Messages:
    1,276
    Likes Received:
    692
    GPU:
    4090 ICHILL BLACK
    tunejunky likes this.

  11. tunejunky

    tunejunky Ancient Guru

    Messages:
    4,345
    Likes Received:
    2,988
    GPU:
    7900xtx/7900xt
  12. anticupidon

    anticupidon Ancient Guru

    Messages:
    7,876
    Likes Received:
    4,120
    GPU:
    Polaris/Vega/Navi
    The BSD network stack is one of the best in *Nix environment, even better than Linux's.
    Netflix did their homework, and it's not all about paying a licence, more to have something to tweak and modify to fit their needs.
     
    RzrTrek, tunejunky and Richard Nutman like this.
  13. Richard Nutman

    Richard Nutman Master Guru

    Messages:
    268
    Likes Received:
    121
    GPU:
    Sapphire 7800XT
    Windows is terrible for this sort of thing.
    I did some high network processing work a while back, and even writing my own windows driver to bypass as much as Windows as possible you just can't get anywhere near the throughput of small packets like you can in Linux.

    Linux has some great libraries like DPDK (originally made by Intel) which has drivers specifically for Mellanox cards for getting wire rate transferes.
    I was able to receive 200Gbit UDP without dropping any packets on a single ConnectX-5 card on a Broadwell based server.

    Linux is just soo much more tweakable as well. You can completely remove certain CPU cores from the scheduler for running real-time threads on, as well as removing soo many components that you have a system barely interrupting your application. You just can't do anything like that in Windows.

    As anticupidon says, if you deploy on Windows Server you have to pay a license for each instance. Linux is free! That's a huge cost saving as well.
     
    tunejunky likes this.
  14. anticupidon

    anticupidon Ancient Guru

    Messages:
    7,876
    Likes Received:
    4,120
    GPU:
    Polaris/Vega/Navi
    There are more reasons why TrueNAS, pFsense, Qnap and others choose BSD as their OS base.
    It may be lacking on the GPU part or desktop environment, but in the server platforms, BSD still has a place and a future.
     
    tunejunky and Richard Nutman like this.

Share This Page