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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

The tale is that they used FreeBSD for Hotmail for like 20 years.

Aug 3, 2000 : https://www.zdnet.com/article/ms-moving-hotmail-to-win2000-s...

> It has been an ongoing sore spot for Microsoft that its highly trafficked Hotmail site runs atop not its own operating system, but the FreeBSD-Apache platform.

> Since it bought Hotmail at the end of 1997, Microsoft repeatedly promised that it would transition Hotmail to Windows NT, then Windows 2000. More than anything, Microsoft's desire was a matter of personal pride. What better way to prove its own contention that NT was just as scalable and robust as Unix than to run its complex, free, Web-based email infrastructure on it. According to the market watchers at Netcraft -- an Internet consultancy based in Bath in the UK -- Microsoft finally has commenced the long-awaited Hotmail migration.

Love the etymology of the original name:

> The name "Hotmail" was chosen out of many possibilities ending in "-mail" as it included the letters HTML, the markup language used to create web pages (to emphasize this, the original type casing was "HoTMaiL").

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook.com#Launch_of_Hotmail

FreeBSD have a lower memory footprint and their network (now together with their filesystem) make it a better server than Linux if you want a better use of your network bandwidth.

I love FreeBSD and would prefer to use it as my desktop instead of Linux, but for servers people should also consider FreeBSD as a great option for a better use of computational resources. (And all this even when Linux have zillions of smart people working hours and hours to optimized it which FreeBSD cannot afford to)

I was also looking into BSDs (FreeBSD and OpenBSD) as an alternative to Linux, but almost every package that I need is available for the top 3 OSs (Win, macOS, Linux) only.

For example, I didn't see vscode for BSD. And I'm worried that maintaining a BSD would be more of a hassle than even Arch Linux.

There's an emulator if you need binary support:

* https://wiki.freebsd.org/Linuxulator

Back in the day I used run the Linux version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein under FreeBSD (with NVidia drivers), and it ran as fast or faster (per FPS counts).

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Castle_Wolfenstein

and you still can:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/freebsd-x64-archiv...

someone at Nvidia must be a FreeBSD stalwart and I’m okay with that

It used to be that if you were going to run BSD that meant either compiling from ports or source. Packages were only available for the most common components, but the default was ports and most admins went along with that because you got greater flexibility/opportunities to optimize. Back then source compiles of software like Apache were the norm for even the Solaris boxes I worked on. Same for most perl modules (I had a decade-long war with Math::Pari).

https://www.freshports.org/editors/vscode/ has apparently been part of the ports tree since 2019 and was last updated 11 days ago.

Whether it's been added to the binary package build farm or you'll have to build the port yourself I don't know though, but poudriere makes (re-)building ports a pretty pleasant experience.

BSD often does start off feeling like a hassle, but the docs are excellent and once you get a feel for it then it doesn't honestly feel like more work than linux. Note: I run a mixture of FreeBSD and Debian on my personal systems and find them both pretty painless, but I do tend to value "do exactly what I told you to" when it comes to recreational sysadminry so bear that preference in mind when interpreting my thoughts.

I love the animated gif at the top of that page. Nice touch!

I seem to remember the BSDs being a lot more reliable for production use, versus Linux, back in around 1996 when HoTMaiL launched.

Hotmail was an acquisition so that makes sense.

Well it’s not like they’d be able to use Windows at that scale lol

They actually wrote a really open paper about the things they needed to do to migrate Hotmail onto Windows servers.

https://web.archive.org/web/20021021164226/http://www.securi...

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