Why is NetBSD the most stable OS here?

Question

Please check figure 2 in this page: Linux versus Windows: OS impact on uptime and speed

Why is NetBSD the most stable OS here?

Answer 1

I would call in to question the experimenters methods here.

Next we analyzed the uptime and response speed per each Operating System. We are monitoring every 30min simultaneously from 3 locations in the USA, Germany, and Austria, so we are performing 1,008 checks per week per each website. That means for example that we made for detected Linux servers 7,295*1,008 = 7,353,360 checks in week 16. Similarly we did 2052*1008= 2,068,416 checks for Windows servers in the same week. That gives us a solid base for OS to OS comparison, assuming that we may neglect other differences (e.g. in each group there will be similar per cent of good ISPs, good application designs, etc.). When we calculate averages and sort data by uptime we got the following pictures (per week):

It seems like there could be drastic problems here. Perhaps a server rebooted in the 30 minute window. Perhaps another server was seen as being down once even though it took 59 minutes of downtime (not 30 or 60). They did have a fairly high sample size though. In reality, most production websites are up considerably more than 99% of the time. There may have been just a couple "bad apples" in each bunch of operating system.

In short, I consider those results to be approximately accurate, but unreliable.

Edit: uptime does not necessarily equate to reliability either. It could be that the admin is also the dev and does not have a dedicated dev machine. As mentioned in the blogpost, the ISP could be flaky. Really, this test was not conducted scientifically at all. These results are novel at best.