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2.4 vs 2.6 Linux Kernel Shootout

Posted by michael on from the bang-bang dept.

FyRE666 writes "Infoworld are currently running an interesting comparison of the 2.4 series kernel against the new 2.6 release on Xeon, Opteron and Itanium CPUs with some surprising benchmark results for common server-related tasks. Basically the new scheduler helps the 2.6 kernel to cream the old 2.4: Samba tests showing up to 73% speed increases, MySQL showing up to 29% and Apache serving dynamic content up to 47% faster!"

3 of 533 comments (clear)

  1. 2.6 on server? by black666 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Those benchmarks are nice, but who runs kernel 2.6 on production servers that need every speed they can get? It will be a few more 2.6.x releases until I consider running one of my servers with a 2.6 kernel.

  2. Re:Linux in cache? by ParisTG · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Caching is controlled completely by the CPU, transparent of the programmer.

    Assuming that the kernel is the only code running, and it is small enough to fit into cache, then it will get there eventually.

    However, it would make no sense to keep the entire kernel in cache, since most of that code isn't used most of the time. Also, application software is running at the same time, which needs to be cached as well.

    In other words, just trust the CPU. It knows what it's doing :).

  3. Re:I can't believe these results by JumboMessiah · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually, it wouldn't suprise me if this is correct. If you notice, he was reading the 500MB file while a continuous streaming write was going on in the background. On 2.4.x, a write streamout will kill read performance drastically. Mostly due to the way the I/O scheduler schedules the read. Which, most of the time, is to stash it at the end of the writes.

    The two new I/O schedulers in 2.6.x help to resolve this. For more info, check here.