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Comment by ashton314 | Hacker News Reader

> freebsd on a new server

It always makes me happy to see how short the list returned from `ps aux` is with FreeBSD. Whereas if you go onto a typical Linux box (even just a raspberry pi!) and run that, you get at least a screenful of processes doing who knows what. (Just my small experience.)

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This is also the experience with Ubuntu on Windows WSL:

  $ ps aux
  USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
  root         1  3.5  0.0   8944   332 ?        Ssl  11:38   0:00 /init
  root         7  0.0  0.0   8944   228 tty1     Ss   11:38   0:00 /init
  dando        8  1.7  0.0  16804  3396 tty1     S    11:38   0:00 -bash
  dando       32  0.0  0.0  17392  1916 tty1     R    11:38   0:00 ps aux

A strange irony that the most purist Unix-like Linux is to be found in the belly of the Windows beast, for the equivalent of those hundreds of processes doing who knows what on a typical native Linux install are instead all in Windows Task Manager.

Tip: If a process is a service-host, run `tasklist /svc` and that way you can actually know what's going on in each process.

If you install a server distro, the number of default processes is pretty minimal. Run GNOME on FreeBSD and you'll get the same huge list of processes.

Not so sure about that, my last fresh install of Ubuntu Server (admittedly like 4-5 years ago now) had several cores hovering in the 20-30% range while idle and nothing was installed on the server yet. "Ooop, guess I'm going back to debian"

> If you install a server distro, the number of default processes is pretty minimal.

It depends on which processes. If you include kernel threads (which show as processes), the number of processes can get pretty huge, especially on many-core servers (several of these kernel threads are per-core).

I don't know whether on FreeBSD kernel threads show up as separate processes; if they don't, it might explain part of the difference.

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