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BSD Talk #42 has an interview Karl Lehenbauer about FlightAware.com. FlightAware tracks flight information, so far example here is their page on live flights to and from Sacramento Executive Airport. There is a lot of information that they are making available for free. Here is an outline of some of the more interesting bits that were mentioned by Karl during the interview.

All of FlightAware’s systems are 64-bit AMD based computers running FreeBSD 6.x, specifically the FreeBSD/amd64 port. They use PostgreSQL for the database back end. Slony 1 is being used to replicate data. Hard drives are in a RAID 1 (mirroring) 3ware configuration using controllers.

Now for some numbers:

• Receiving the data and processing it puts them about 6 minutes behind real time
• Generating one map can be done in about 160 milliseconds of CPU time
• Capable of generating several million maps a day
• About 1 TB of stored data
• Approximately 40 million position updates on air craft per day

PostgreSQL wasn’t able to keep up with the updates so they wrote a memory resident database service queries. I’m still not exactly clear on what the relationship is between PostgreSQL and their memory resident database, which uses about 1 GB of RAM.

Nice to see a company putting FreeBSD and PosgreSQL to good use. I’m curious about the 40 million inserts per day number. Bring on the math!

• 40,000,000 inserts per day
• 40,000,000 / 24 = 1,666,667 inserts per hour
• 1,666,6667 / 60 = 27,778 inserts per minute
• 27,227 / 60 = 463 inserts per second

So that boils down to about 463 inserts per second on average. I’d expect that their actual peak requirements are much higher than that (perhaps two or three times that number?). That is just data that they are receiving, that doesn’t include the queries being run against their system to power the website. This brings up another question, how much bandwidth do they have dedicated to receiving these updates? It is possible that each individual update is fairly small (lat, long, src, dest, flight id, airline, plane type, etc) so that might not be too bad. Even at 256 bytes per update, doing 40 million of those a day adds up very quickly.

Right now their website provides the following numbers:

Currently Tracking

Tracking 4,986 airborne aircraft (224 VFR) with 21,205,488 total flights in the database.
FlightAware has tracked 48,940 arrivals in the last 24 hours.

Randomnetworks.com

It is my great pleasure and privilege to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE. This release is the next step in the development of the 6.X branch, delivering several performance improvements, many bugfixes, and a few new features. These include:

• Addition of a keyboard multiplexer. This allows USB and PS/2 keyboards to coexist without any special options at boot.
• Many fixes for filesystem stability. High load stress tests are now run successfully on a regular basis as part of the normal FreeBSD QA process.
• Automatic configuration for man Bluetooth devices, as well as automatic support for running WiFi access points.
• Addition of drivers for new ethernet and SAS and SATA RAID controllers.
• BIND updated to 9.3.2
• sendmail updated to 8.13.6

NOTE: It was discovered at the last minute that the errata notes that got packaged with the release are out of date. For a complete list of known problems, please see the online errata list, available at:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/6.1R/relnotes.html
http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/6.1R/errata.html

For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities, please see:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng

Availability

FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE supports the i386, pc98, alpha, sparc64, amd64, powerpc, and ia64 architectures and can be installed directly over the net using bootable media or copied to a local NFS/FTP server. Distributions for all architectures are available now.

Please continue to support the FreeBSD Project by purchasing media from one of our supporting vendors. The following companies will be offering FreeBSD 6.1 based products:

• FreeBSD Mall, Inc. http://www.freebsdmall.com/
• Daemonnews, Inc. http://www.bsdmall.com/freebsd1.html

If you can’t afford FreeBSD on media, are impatient, or just want to use it for evangelism purposes, then by all means download the ISO images. We can’t promise that all the mirror sites will carry the larger ISO images, but they will at least be available from the following sites. MD5 and SHA256 checksums for the release images are included at the bottom of this message.

Bittorrent

The FreeBSD project encourages the use of BitTorrent for distributing the release ISO images. A collection of torrent files to download the images is available at:

http://torrents.freebsd.org:8080/

FTP

At the time of this announcement the following FTP sites have FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE available.

• ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp2.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp3.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp5.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp.at.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp2.ch.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp.cz.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp.ee.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp.fi.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp.fr.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp2.ie.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp.is.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp1.ru.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp.se.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp.si.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp2.tw.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp2.uk.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp2.us.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp5.us.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/

FreeBSD is also available via anonymous FTP from mirror sites in the following countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Lithuania, Amylonia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.

Before trying the central FTP site, please check your regional mirror(s) first by going to:

ftp://ftp..FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD

Any additional mirror sites will be labeled ftp2, ftp3 and so on.

More information about FreeBSD mirror sites can be found at:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mirrors-ftp.html

For instructions on installing FreeBSD, please see Chapter 2 of The FreeBSD Handbook. It provides a complete installation walk-through for users new to FreeBSD, and can be found online at:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install.html

Acknowledgments

Many companies donated equipment, network access, or man-hours to finance the release engineering activities for FreeBSD 6.1 including The FreeBSD Foundation, FreeBSD Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo!, Sentex Communications, and Copan Systems.

The release engineering team for 6.1-RELEASE includes: