This is a serious question, for heavy users of OpenBSD in big/production/heavy-traffic situations.
For years, our small company used OpenBSD for *EVERYTHING* because I personally prefer it. (We run a pretty popular database-driven website.) All mail servers, web servers, database servers, were all OpenBSD. But then some threads-issue with MySQL on OpenBSD made us switch to FreeBSD for our database server, in an emergency. The increasing load on the server was making OpenBSD buckle, and switching to FreeBSD (on the same hardware!) was a 100x speed improvement. Unfortunately, we switched other servers to FreeBSD, too, to standardize, and have been almost entirely FreeBSD, since. Ah, but this was back in 2001 or so. I know things in OpenBSD are better now. SMP. Etc. Things at our company have grown enough so that we finally have load-balanced servers, so not all traffic needs to be whomping a single server. We're setting up some new hardware, and I want us to take a look at OpenBSD again for things like webservers and database servers. (Not too happy with the SMP in FreeBSD.) Maybe even get back to our old situation of being 100% OpenBSD for everything. Which leads me to my real question for you heavy users of OpenBSD in big/production/heavy-traffic situations: When would you NOT use OpenBSD? When would you choose one of the other *nix over OpenBSD? Is OpenBSD appropriate for a busy webserver or super-loaded database server? I've seen old "O.S. shootouts" benchmarks comparing O.S.'s and often showing Linux or FreeBSD excelling at webserving or database-performance, but I don't know if that's just old data or the benchmarkers didn't have OpenBSD tweaked right. As you can tell I'd *like* to go back to OpenBSD-everywhere but thought it would be wise to ask the misc@ gang about this first. Thanks!
