For development, Neo4j should run fine on Windows and most flavors of Linux or BSD. A DMG installer is also available for OS X. When going to production, however, Linux is the best choice for a successful cluster. With Neo4j version 2.1 and earlier, one of the cache layers was off heap in the Linux releases, but on heap for Windows. This essentially made it impossible to cache a large amount of graph data while running on Windows.[1]
On Linux, Neo4j requires more than the default number of maximum open file handles. Increase that to 40,000 by adjusting the following line in the /etc/security/limits.conf file:
* - nofile 40000
