I really like FreeBSD, but the one chance I had to run it in a moderate scale production environment as a server I was unable to because it used 30% more power

I really like FreeBSD, but the one chance I had to run it in a moderate scale production environment as a server I was unable to because it used 30% more power than Linux. I started following the optimization guide in the handbook but after about two days and only about 15% reduction in power, I realized that these FreeBSD servers might be more trouble than they were worth. Not to mention I could have spent the same time optimizing Linux power consumption too. I like to run FreeBSD as a headless VM through Linux and SSH in and tinker around from time to time and for a while I was building a small personal 'cloud' on a home FreeBSD server in my spare time. It's a really fun OS to use. In my experience, it's just a little more trouble than Linux though.