Nearly 2 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD

Echo|Fox writes "So much for *BSD is dying. The latest Netcraft survey shows over 2 million active sites, and almost 4 million active hostnames all running on FreeBSD. Combined with the report that 5 of the top 10 hosting companies in terms of reliability were FreeBSD based, it's been a very positive month *BSD wise. Perhaps the most interesting quote from the survey is: 'Indeed it [FreeBSD] is the only other operating system that is gaining, rather than losing share of the active sites found by the Web Server Survey.'"

Comments

Ah hell,

[Eneff]

And I don't have the "BSD is Dying" troll handy.

We still have the Natalie Portman and SCO dying trolls, right?
__

Seriously, I don't know why BSD isn't taken more seriously as a server. Linux is insecure, whereas BSD...

Damn, another troll.

I give up.

Does Mac OS X count?

[Isbiten]

Does OS X count, when they sum up all the BSD machines?

Re:Does Mac OS X count?

[agent dero]

On Netcraft MacOS X shows up as MacOS X and in the server string it states "Darwin"

So no, they are not including MacOS X :-)

Slight error in story posting

[Sevn]

5 of the top 10 hosting companies in terms of reliability were FreeBSD based

When in actuality the netcraft article says this:

"Intriguingly, all of the Top 5 placed sites run the FreeBSD operating system" :)

Slight difference there.

Might as well get this out of the way now...

[Sevn]

This doesn't show anything! I'm a big fanboy for:

_____ -- put OS here

That runs:

_____ -- put web server here

And it's just as reliable and good as FreeBSD.
Hell, It's BETTER because:

___________________________-- put dubious statistics here

_______ -- put marketing rhetoric here

And besides, you can't do:

________ -- put proprietary technology here

with FreeBSD anyway so it's worthless!!!

News at 11...

[Anonymous Coward]

...nearly 2 million active sites are dying :)

miscellania (sp?)

[ph43thon]

I found this article hopeful.. at first. It seems to suggest that the only reason BSD sites are increasing is because of mainly Yahoo and a few other hosting sites who use BSD. Either way, if Yahoo uses it.. people who work at Yahoo must learn to administer it. So that's good.. I guess.

Now, as for the professional "anon cows" who seem to dedicate their creativity to explaining the end of BSD, these arguments are disingenious. Mainly, the only thing that may or may not be dying is the current power structure behind the three named distributions (open, free, net). The centralized structure may eventually die.. and then BSD will just adopt the decentralized model ala Linux.

saying FreeBSD is dying would be like saying "Latin is dying" back when it started branching into its current variants. By making such statements.. one just shows how little they grasp what BSD is. Maybe people don't speak Latin today... but they certainly speak Spanish or Italian. In the future, people may not have a Main Office to hold their "I heart BSD" rallies.. but they will be using it.

FreeBSD is very alive!!!

[horcy]

I'm running FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE as a server/router solution. I've talked with linux users about al the amazing features it has and the stability it offers. All of have switched to FreeBSD. If you want to install something, you just look up your port in the ports list, you type: make install distclean, and you are ready. It automatically downloads it from a ftp server, if the first is down, it checks for a mirror site. It checks for all necessary dependencies and installs that too. I started with Mandrake linux and after that i'm in FreeBSD land. Never looked back since. Oh did i mention it has the Unreal Tournament and Quake3 server in the ports? One "make install" away for pure gaming haven for you and all your friends =P

Re:FreeBSD is very alive!!!

[bugg]

It is very unfair, in my opinion, to refer to the process of system call translation (the driving force behind FreeBSD's linuxulator, which enables, for those of you who don't know, software *compiled for Linux* to run on FreeBSD- of note only for the Linux software that does not have source available) as emulation. It is binary compatibility of the highest order. Simply put, it does little more than translate syscall numbers on the fly, also adjusting for things like differences in arguments. Quickly sizing up the FreeBSD system source tree right now, the code for linux compatiblity comes in at under 256KB. The overhead per system call of the linuxulator is not measured in fractions of a second but rather in instructions. Add to that the possiblity that FreeBSD may be doing the system call itself faster, or be more responsive for other reasons, and you quickly see that there's no reason to assume the footing is unequal because the binaries were compiled for Linux.

Re:*BSD is dying

[kace]

It is official; Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is dying ... Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers. ... All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share.

I think I get it now. These trolls -- they're all government accountants!

"It depends what the meaning of the word 'more' is."

Troll and Offtopic don't seem quite right....

[ctucker]

What we really need is more downmod options, like "Stupid fool", "Moron", "Cum-gargling gutterslut" or "Too inbred to think". Clearly these would be more specific to the type of BSD troll who links to early-90s filesystem research papers and claims that it has any relevance today.

What the summary doesn't tell you

[ArmorFiend]

Indeed it [FreeBSD] is the only other operating system that is gaining, rather than losing share

Only other than what? It turns out, if you follow links, that Win2k3 server is the other gaining OS. They go on to say this:

Comparing the sites which are now hosted on Windows 2003 with their operating system in December 2002 shows over 42% of these to be new sites, 43% (68K) to be upgrades from other Windows platforms (mainly Windows 2000), 5% (8K) to be migrations from Linux and 1% from other operating systems.

Microsoft will take some considerable encouragement at the number of sites that have switched from Linux.

Woo, 1/20th of their new sales come from previously linux sites.
*Makes hand-wank gesture*

Re:What the summary doesn't tell you

[ratfynk]

It just means that the number of windows software pirates has increased in proportion to the number of useless lame web sites. I have no dought Win2003 is the spammers Os of choice. If one looks to the Orient software pirates prefer Windows server software because of ease of use, and the fact that it is easy to pirate. I believe I have read somewhere that the pirate trick is now by using a false verification web activation, and the law authorities are having real trouble keeping track of the pirates.

Gates might be having kittens but the 2003 licence sales are not reflected in the number that are poping up, like a weed on the outlaw net. This kind of software piracy is a direct result of MS pricing policies.

Microsoft may be trying to encourage poor countries to use their software by giving it away , to influence local authorities to crack down. They tried the other root (American strongarm political influence) and failed. So they tried the stick now they are trying candy.

Re:So Much For *BSD Is Living

[nutznboltz]

AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry

Oh and Linux has no problems with lawsuits.

Theo de Raadt

You've got RMS, don't talk about Theo.

BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing."

Obsolete refernce, doesn't mention softupdates.

rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development.

The Linux kernel development has to push everything through Linus so you've got bottlenecks too.

corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source

You've got LindowsOS so don't talk about corporate greed.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team.

So all the current success is not happening, huh?

Is it just me or does the *BSD is Dying troll seem like he has real problems

Enterprise BSD?

[iggymanz]

I'm involved in an Oracle on Solaris/sparc to Linux/Intel migration, and I can't but thinking why not also FreeBSD for the enterprise? It has the fibre HBA drivers for SAN, it has a volume manager, it has a very stable filesystem (moreso than ext2/3), it can run Oracle with Linux emulation libraries, has SMP, a fantastic TCP/IP stack, easy installation/upgrading of ports & packages.

I never used FreeBSD until a few months ago when I tried to get my favorite, OpenBSD, up on a very weird 1U Intel based server I picked up on eBay from a failed telco. Versions 2.9 to 3.3 of OBSD wouldn't work, it would hang in the idle loop FreeBSD 5.x has been running fine on it (don't know why)

Re:Enterprise BSD?

[MattBurke]

Try taking a sniff around the servers of larger, more clueful ISPs - They almost all use FreeBSD. Why? Because that's the place FreeBSD grew up. Linux has the hobyist hackers working on it whereas a high proportion of FreeBSD users/developers work in the ISP biz. It's just evolved into the perfect serious server OS.

I've seen FreeBSD boxes (mail servers to be precise) with load averages approaching 1000. They were sluggish, but perfectly usable both over ssh and smtp. That was during a rather nasty spam attack - yet the boxes kept on working. You couldn't say that for a Linux box in that situation. Sorry, but it would be stone cold dead by then.

Sure, we don't have all the twinkly bits that Linux users enjoy, but we go get one mother of a workhorse :D