Hm, best Linux alternative? Is Linux the “best” for this?
VyOS, probably.
Or simply OpenWRT.
Maybe it's already faster than Linux?
Have people benchmarked this recently? I feel like this flamewar is still based on forum posts from 1998
I haven't seen any recent head-to-head benchmarks but Netflix is getting really good performance from FreeBSD networking and they publish detailed information about it. It gets discussed here every six months or so. Of course networking encompasses many different workloads (e.g. routing with PFSense is going to be a different code path than serving data over HTTPS) and each OS probably has its own strengths and weaknesses.