[forca]

I have noticed over the last ten or so years that FreeBSD in particular is ridiculously stable -- far more so than any Linux distro I have tried, including Red Hat, CentOS, and Debian.

I have stable Linux machines running Debian and I have FreeBSD test machines running the same software. FreeBSD uses less resources (exact same HW), tends to be slightly faster, and is arguably easier to admin on a daily basis. Let's not even mention ZFS, which is remarkable in its own right. I'm impressed. I once ran an OpenBSD pf firewall that supported almost 200 users on some seruously underpowered HW. This thing's load average was always ridiculously low. Ditto FreeBSD now. What will cause the Debain machines to peak out sometimes, FreeBSD doesn't seem to notice. Interesting and a bit impressive.

[_delirium]

I also like both FreeBSD and Debian (have no real experience with the others). But on performance it varies a lot by workload. To take two examples: over the years at any given point in time, FreeBSD has had a better networking stack than Linux, but worse scalability to large numbers of cores. Though there is some ongoing sponsored work on the latter [1,2].

[1] http://www.ixsystems.com/whats-new/freebsd-foundation-and-ix...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8123512