Here are some benchmarks of the two (also including freebsd, linux and 
solaris). This should address both peroformance questions. I try not to 
take benchmarkstoo seriously but these seem pretty on the mark from my 
personal experience:

http://innominate.org/%7Etgr/projects/tuning/
As far as security my personal opinion (and I emphasize 'opinion') is 
that OpenBSD seems to have security 'in mind' but do not believe it 
delivers fully. OpenBSD has gotten alot of attention in the past 6+ 
months and in that time have seen quite an increase in vernerabilities 
more than I have seen for NetBSD in that period. You would be best off 
looking at:

http://www.cert.org

and draw your own conclusions. I think stability and reliabilty is a 
toss up and could go either way. Functionality also seems to be pretty 
close but I have seen that OpenBSD has put a good amount of work into 
IPsec which may help your situation with a firewall but with the amount 
of insecurities as of late it may not.

The best option for any OS I believe is to thoroughly test your options 
and read as much of the documentation that either provides and compare 
them from your experiences, rather than opinions.

BTW: I do not see a spell checking option in mozilla 0.6 so please 
forgive my spelling.

Jim Reef wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm trying to decide wether to go with OpenBSD or NetBSD for 
> http/firewall/mail/backup etc. serving.  I know that OpenBSD split 
> from NetBSD so the two operating systems are very similar.  However, 
> without starting a holy war, I would like to know how the two compare 
> in (i386):
> 
> - performance (speed?)
> - network performance (faster/more advanced network stack?)
> - security (bugs, exploits etc)
> - stability & reliability (crashes, bugs etc)
> - functionality (network protocols supported etc)
> 
> I've been to both websites and I looked around a little bit.  It would 
> be nice to hear from users who have used both operating systems. 
> Please e-mail me private, as I don't want to start a flame war on this 
> list.  Thanks for any help.
> 
> Regards
> _________________________________________________________________
> Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
> 
> 
>