but I have always been made to understand that BSD's (namely FreeBSD) handle high traffic better than linux
For the past several years, and up until FreeBSD 7 you've always been seriously misled. FreeBSD has historically had dramatically worse performance in most concurrent server applications (certainly in multi-process SMP workloads). As of FreeBSD 7, it generally is the equal or slight better of Linux. It is not better in enough categories or by a large enough margin for anyone to say with confidence that a particular workload will perform better on FreeBSD or Linux. One would always have to benchmark the actual application, and the differences would be minimal in most cases...and with every new kernel release, you'd have to benchmark again, because things change and performance advantages might flip from one release to the next.
And, tptacek is correct, none of the other BSDs has inherited these dramatic performance improvements found in FreeBSD 7, so they are very unlikely to provide better performance than any modern Linux version on modern multi-core hardware.
For the past several years, and up until FreeBSD 7 you've always been seriously misled. FreeBSD has historically had dramatically worse performance in most concurrent server applications (certainly in multi-process SMP workloads). As of FreeBSD 7, it generally is the equal or slight better of Linux. It is not better in enough categories or by a large enough margin for anyone to say with confidence that a particular workload will perform better on FreeBSD or Linux. One would always have to benchmark the actual application, and the differences would be minimal in most cases...and with every new kernel release, you'd have to benchmark again, because things change and performance advantages might flip from one release to the next.
And, tptacek is correct, none of the other BSDs has inherited these dramatic performance improvements found in FreeBSD 7, so they are very unlikely to provide better performance than any modern Linux version on modern multi-core hardware.