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The comment I'm replying to is curiously omitting to mention that, since Oracle doesn't support FreeBSD, it's hardly a surprise that Yahoo deploys Oracle on a different OS - they're simply forced to.
Hardly. If a customer like Yahoo!, who probably spends millions a year on Oracle (a search for 'oracle' in the above-mentioned Yahoo! jobs page returns 89 openings), wanted to run Oracle on FreeBSD, they would get the support they need. This is a missed opportunity for FreeBSD, since this is exactly the kind of customer Oracle needs to justify FreeBSD support. Instead, Yahoo! uses Linux, just like they did with MySQL earlier.
However, I'm not aware of any commercial constraints that would prevent Yahoo from choosing a different OS for their fast-growing web infrastructure. But, again, it looks like this is not the case: http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=yahoo.com
Why would they? Yahoo! has been a FreeBSD shop since day one and FreeBSD serves very well in this capacity, noone has claimed otherwise. However, as indicated, much of the heavy lifting in the back is now done on machines running Linux, be it with Oracle or MySQL.
Remember when Hotmail used to be another high-profile FreeBSD user that people would bring up in a discussion like this? Well, it was always Solaris in the back (http://www.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail.html), and the situation with Yahoo! looks to become somewhat analogus, but now with Linux in the back.
This is hardly a surprise either, since worldwide FreeBSD is running many more websites than any Linux distro - 2.5 million against RedHat's 1.6 million, were the numbers two years ago.
Indeed, and ironically enough considering the above discussion, in large part due to Yahoo's deployments. The thing is, FreeBSD is occupying pretty much the exact same niche it did ten years ago, as primarily a web hosting platform. In the mean time, Linux has established itself on everything from mainframes and supercomputers to handhelds, and has established itself in what used to be a FreeBSD stronghold, Yahoo!.




Member since:
2005-07-07
The comment I'm replying to is curiously omitting to mention that, since Oracle doesn't support FreeBSD, it's hardly a surprise that Yahoo deploys Oracle on a different OS - they're simply forced to.
However, I'm not aware of any commercial constraints that would prevent Yahoo from choosing a different OS for their fast-growing web infrastructure. But, again, it looks like this is not the case:
http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=yahoo.com
This is hardly a surprise either, since worldwide FreeBSD is running many more websites than any Linux distro - 2.5 million against RedHat's 1.6 million, were the numbers two years ago.
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/06/07/nearly_25_million_acti...