That decision was made long before I joined Netflix. My understanding is that the initial decision was made due to the license. After that, our team attracte

That decision was made long before I joined Netflix. My understanding is that the initial decision was made due to the license. After that, our team attracted a large number of FreeBSD committers, so it just kept its momentum. 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.