alt Hacker NewsThis is awesome! Small projects like this that take off are fun to read.
Maybe I'm imaging it but FreeBSD really seems to have far less bloat than Linux distros and better latency. I just setup a $4/mo FreeBSD VM on Vultr with 1G RAM and 1vCPU and it's only using 12% of RAM with Caddy. A VM with 4GB of RAM and 4 vCPUs could serve a lot of traffic.
I'm wanting to create a personal blogging with a retro BBS-like web app with a text first interface with a multi-threaded Nim server + sqlite. I'm sure something exists already but it'd more for my own tinkering. No containers, no async, no javascript libraries. Just a small 4MB binary and FreeBSD. This posts encourages me on the FreeBSD route!
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FreeBSD may have less bloat, but I'm running a web server in a Linux container (debian-slim - so not even as small as you can go with linux) with only 256mb RAM (of which it is only using ~64mb).
I somehow remember Linux using half the resources it does today, 20 years ago. It occurs to me now for the first time, that this might be due to the switch to x64.
That's probably not the only reason but it bothers me that I never considered that before! I remember at some point it used twice as much RAM for basically the same thing, and I remember being bothered by that.
But I guess what you get in exchange for that is the ability to put in basically unlimited RAM.
> have far less bloat than Linux distros and better latency
I think this has always been the norm from what I remember. That said, Arch Linux, KISS, Void, etc. are minimal enough, IMO.
Unbloated distros exist, Alpine is one example. I was taken aback how snappy it is. Does everything without any undue delay. Merely logging in via SSH feels quicker as you don't have to wait a second for the prompt like on Ubuntu. apk is also super fast.
The BSD utils are always much nicer to read than the GNU ones when you want to understand what's going on, there's no competition.
I do prefer the GNU style licensing model & popularity but for the code itself, I prefer the BSD ones.
> retro BBS-like web app
You mean like oldschool dialup BBSes, or a forum-style "Bulletin Board"? If the latter, take a look at FlaskBB :-)
For Linux this will vary between distributions and configurations. For example, based on some testing I did today using mkosi [1] (for reasons unrelated to this discussion), a bare-bones Fedora 43 installation uses about 130 MiB of RAM, while a Debian installation uses a little more than 100 MiB.
IIRC last time I tried a bare-bones FreeBSD installation it used about the same amount of memory, maybe a little more based on how ZFS is set up.
[1]: https://github.com/systemd/mkosi