With the recent releases of NetBSD 2.0 and FreeBSD 5.3 operating system, many new and exciting features have been implemented. Both criticism and commendation on performance, reliability and scalability have been directed towards these releases.

This paper presents a suite of benchmarks and results for comparing the performance of these operating systems. The benchmarks target core operating system functionality, server scalability and thread implementation. These benchmarks are useful server-based criteria for demanding applications such as loaded webservers, databases, and voice-over-IP (VoIP) media relays. The results indicate that NetBSD has surpassed FreeBSD in performance on nearly every benchmark and is poised to grab the title of the best operating system for the server environment.