Ben Lunsford's answer to Is FreeBSD faster than Linux?

ARANK

Yes, FreeBSD is faster than Linux. Yet, Linux is faster than FreeBSD. So it depends on what you’re talking about. The TL;DR version is: FreeBSD has lower latency, and Linux has faster application speeds.Yes, the TCP/IP stack of FreeBSD has far less latency than Linux. That’s why Netflix chooses to stream its movies and shows to you on FreeBSD and never Linux. It’s also why Netflix chooses to pay some of its best engineers to contribute to the current and future codebase of the FreeBSD kernel and not the Linux kernel.In general, many web applications feel “faster” on FreeBSD servers due to the better “response time” or latency.But nearly all applications run faster on Linux than FreeBSD. IBM and Intel are the two largest benefactors to the Linux kernel, and they are very application (not networking) focused. Virtually every supercomputer runs on Linux for this very reason. If you are using *nix as a workstation rather than Windows or Mac, nearly everything you could run, except …