Developer swaps legacy Ubuntu for FreeBSD, citing security and performance gains
A personal blog operator has moved from an unsupported Ubuntu 16.04 environment to a FreeBSD 14.3 stack, reporting significant improvements in request throughput and latency stability during global benchmarking.
A developer has migrated a long-running personal blog from an unsupported Ubuntu 16.04 instance on DigitalOcean to a FreeBSD 14.3 server hosted by Hetzner. The move was driven by security concerns, as the Ubuntu release has been out of support for at least five years, leaving the system without security updates or access to the apt package repository. The migration also aimed to reduce monthly hosting costs from $13 USD to under €6 while upgrading hardware specifications.
The new infrastructure utilises FreeBSD Jails managed by Bastille, providing isolated subsystems that share the host kernel. Caddy handles reverse proxying and automatic SSL certificate management, replacing the previous Nginx setup. The author noted that Caddy simplifies certificate renewal, which had been a manual process with Certbot on the legacy server. The system also employs ZFS for frequent snapshots, reducing reliance on paid provider backup systems.
Load benchmarks were conducted using wrk and hey from four global locations: London, São Paulo, Silicon Valley, and Tokyo. The tests revealed that the FreeBSD server significantly outperformed the legacy Ubuntu setup. In São Paulo, the new server handled approximately 94% of one million test requests, compared to just 7% for the Ubuntu instance. The FreeBSD server also demonstrated superior latency stability, with 90% of requests completing in under 3.5 seconds across all tested regions.
Initial high-concurrency testing exposed a configuration issue where the kernel parameter kern.ipc.somaxconn was set to 128, causing the server to fail under 10,000 concurrent connections. This was resolved by increasing the socket queue size. The author attributed the performance gains partly to the more powerful hardware on the Hetzner server, which features four CPU cores compared to the single vCPU on the DigitalOcean droplet, as well as the efficiency of the FreeBSD stack.
The author observed that a significant portion of traffic to the blog is now generated by AI systems crawling the site. Despite the technical success of the migration, the developer noted that the increased performance may be largely redundant given the nature of the current traffic sources. The migration highlights a shift towards modern, cost-effective virtualisation for personal infrastructure, moving away from legacy, unsupported Linux distributions.
