Hello,

I am thinking of setting up a new relay.

I know that the hardware in the server is going to be the bottleneck, not my Internet connection.

I have a problem deciding on which OS to use for the relay.

A few years ago when I had a similar relay going, I had it running on OpenBSD first.

Then I changed the OS to FreeBSD and the performance got about 20% better.

I have no idea if this would be the case today too.

So I think that maybe it's either FreeBSD or Debian that would be "best", but I have nothing concrete to base that decision on unless I try them both.

I am going to use a Via C7 board in this specific case. So I suspect that it's the maturity of the VIA drivers in the OS that is going to make the difference. Still I would like to know how to think in similar situations in the future even for other hardware.

Has anyone any concrete experience of the tor relay speeds on different operating systems?

I don't want to start a flame war of religious beliefs, but I suspect that OSes differ in how optimized they are for different tasks.

Thankful for any constructive input on this.

Regards,

Farid