Earlier this week Phoronix published a set of comparative benchmarks regarding Ubuntu, testing various recent releases to compare their performance figures on all sorts of different tasks. They’ve now done the same thing for Fedora, so we can compare Fedora and Ubuntu in terms of performance.
The test machine used to acquire these benchmarks is the same as the one used for Ubuntu. The degradation in performance as we saw with Ubuntu doesn’t seem to take place that much on Fedora – there’s a difference, but it’s hardly significant. If we compare the latest Ubuntu (8.0, the release candidate) with the latest Fedora 10 test release (snapshot 3) we see that the two distributions barely differ when it comes to performance.
This is obviously not that big a surprise, seeing both distributions include mostly the same pieces of software. Obviously, these benchmarks are limited in that they only apply to one machine, so be careful with inferring any definitive conclusions regarding performance from these figures.
Most differences seem pretty random to me. I also fail to see the progressive degradation in Ubuntu. We have 7.04 in one hand which performs a lot better than everyone else for some things and a lot worse for others and then random variation which can have many different origins for the other systems.
On the whole, many of the results showed that Fedora & Ubuntu were not radically different when it cam to performance apart from Ubuntu 7.x.
Quite why these releases performed so much better than the rest in many test and also a darn sight worse is something that could well be wort investigation.
The rising times for compilations on Ubuntu is to me a source for some concern especially when you compare them to the pretty flat times of Fedora.
IMHO, Fedora just seems to be a bit more consistent in the performance dept than Ubuntu.
It appears that it’s not that newer Ubuntus are slow but that 7.04 was for some reason, crazy fast. Fedora and the newer Ubuntus performed about the same except in compiling, where Fedora (and ubuntu 7.04) killed the newer ubuntus totally. So essentially, everyone should stop bitching about ubuntu being slow (because it’s no worse than the competition) and instead try to figure out why 7.04 was so fast.
Ubuntu 7.x was the best version I worked with.
8.04 was very buggy and bother to work with (due to kernel issues). Then came 8.10 which fixed the 8.04 and made it work.
8 felt a lot more heavy than 7 on my multimedia applications.
My hardware is very new and It should fly but its not.
But what should I ask for the buggy and slow and infect-able Windows or the very expensive middle quality hardware Apple bundles with their great OS.
Thanks god for linux
7.04/10 Ubuntu is faster 2x vs newer Ubuntu 8.x in ONLY huge math calculations tests AND ONLY on dual core systems. So only one core is used for math-intense operations on Ubuntu 8.x. Nothing serious.
It would be interesting to test on 4-core CPU. We may see Ubuntu 7.x 4 times better than 8.x on math calculations here.
I think the Linux kernel and the method Ubuntu and other distributions use to compile it has a big role in the gradual degrade of performance.
My guess is distribution kernels select nearly all the options in Linux’s makeconfig utility to provide common denominator support for most generic hardware and select basic performance optimizations for a broad-range of x86-based CPUs.
The situation will only worsen with time; therefore performance conscience users may consider re-compiling the kernel with only the necessary drivers and specific optimizations for their CPU type.
Instead of recompiling the kernel, a better baseline for the lowest common denominator would be to run the 64-bit version of the OS (most new machines sold in the last 2-3 years are 64-bit capable). That way, you don’t get both the kernel and binaries being dumbed down to an i386 set of opcodes, plus you may see some performance benefit over the 32-bit version. Yes, it’ll use more RAM, but that’s one thing that’s very cheap nowadays.
The Ubuntu 7.04 RAM speed test ,which oviously affects the whole system ,just can’t be right –
– I just can’t imagine for the other versions to suck sooo much compared to Ubuntu 7.04 .
Maybe they also put a lot more work into running fast on older hardware & then bothered less with later versions .
Edited 2008-11-01 22:32 UTC