# FreeBSD for fast website acess



## bold (Jun 10, 2014)

Can a website speed of accessing change by the operating system? There are less BSD users (I guess) when compared to Windows and Linux. So does this gives a BSD user an edge to load web pages faster. Web sites like (my) college results load up very slow. So does using FreeBSD or PC-BSD to access web pages increase the speed of web?


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## SirDice (Jun 10, 2014)

bold said:
			
		

> So does using FreeBSD or PC-BSD to access web pages increase the speed of web?


No, why would it?


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## usdmatt (Jun 10, 2014)

> There are less BSD users (I guess) when compared to Windows and Linux. So does this gives a BSD user an edge to load web pages faster.



This makes no sense at all. Why would there being less FreeBSD users mean that FreeBSD would load websites faster...

Website load time is mostly affected by three factors:

1) How fast the source server can generate and send the webpage data
2) How quickly that data can get to you
3) How quickly and efficiently your computer can draw the webpage once it has the data

1 & 2 obviously have nothing to do with your operating system (well OS network performance may affect number 2 but probably not enough for it to really be relevant). These two will also generally have the biggest impact on how fast a website loads for you.

The third one is mostly down to how good the browser is and the performance of your hardware rather than the OS. Even on the same hardware with the same browser (such as Chromium/Firefox) I wouldn't be surprised if Windows loads sites faster than FreeBSD. Browser developers put a hell of a lot of work into optimising their rendering engines, making use of hardware acceleration where possible, and a lot of these performance tweaks will be aimed primarily at Windows.

In the end though, how fast websites load is not something I would even bother putting in a 'reasons to choose OS A over B' list.


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## wblock@ (Jun 10, 2014)

bold said:
			
		

> Can a website speed of accessing change by the operating system? There are less BSD users (I guess) when compared to Windows and Linux. So does this gives a BSD user an edge to load web pages faster. Web sites like (my) college results load up very slow. So does using FreeBSD or PC-BSD to access web pages increase the speed of web?



It all goes over the same intertubes.  A Ferrari can't go fast in a traffic jam.

A FreeBSD system might be able to display web pages faster than another system if the interaction between the browser and the operating system worked better on FreeBSD.  In practice, user-level speedups like running Adblock Plus are a bigger and easier win that reduces the amount of data to be retrieved.


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