The question that popped to my head was why FreeBSD? I stopped using it for anything back in 2006. Since much of this tuning/debugging/analysis relates to the OS/kernel shouldnt the article start there?
I've done kernel work in both OSes, and I'm pretty much agnostic myself. I find the biggest drawback to FreeBSD is hardware support. Netflix has actually driven a fair amount of vendors to provide FreeBSD support due to our using FreeBSD.
I will say that FreeBSD has a few things that Linux doesn't, specifically async sendfile. This ends up being far more efficient than either a thread pool, or aio daemons for handling IO completions. Async sendfile is also one of the things that drove us to implement TLS encryption in the kernel, and is the foundation that pretty much our entire stack rests upon.
Yes, and the rest of us FreeBSD users greatly appreciate you for that! Please keep using FreeBSD and pushing these vendors and this household will keep throwing 2 x $10/month at Netflix. :-)
So you go to a Linux conference looking for people. When you get there the conference is crowded with idiots, advertisers, and companies. No way to find the smart people.
Now you got to a FreeBSD conference. It is almost empty but the majority of the people know what they are doing. You only need to be interesting, have a clue, and buy a beer to get all the attention you want. ;-)
It also had very good tracing tools before Linux did, so reasoning about performance bottlenecks is much easier.
The networking stack has also handily beat Linux for as long as I can remember.
Can you quantify what "beat" means here? Do you have a citation for this? I am doubting this is true in 2017.
None of the TOP500 use FreeBSD [1]. I would have thought this would be a primary consideration for a supercomputer. Most of them are using Linux (99.6%!).
And they have a huge number of very smart people working on it. I've had the privilege of working with some of them at Google, and have nothing but respect for them.