Benchmarks Compared For Kernels 2.4.25 and 2.6.4

Josh MacLean writes "I noticed a link to an interesting article over at OSNews comparing performance of Linux kernels 2.4.25 and 2.6.4. While the workstation benchmarks are rather mundane, the server benchmarks (including Apache and MySQL) proved to be quite interesting. The rest of the Linux geeks might appreciate this. The comment thread that's linked on the last page is turning out to be relatively amusing as well."

Comments

statistics

[Hatta]

One second isn't exactly a huge gap, but this was averaged over five runs, so I will have to give the nod to the venerable 2.4 kernel here.

Well at least he knows how to take a mean. Why is it that benchmarks never include any error? Is it so hard to put errorbars on a chart? Is a simple T test too much to ask?

Apache 1.3?

[ttfkam]

Apache 2.0 has a worker module that uses both threads and processes on Linux. 1.3 just preforks. Since one of the big improvements in 2.6 was threading support and since Apache 2.0 can run in either mode anyway, why test 1.3?

If you want to test something more "stable," why bother testing the 2.6 kernel? After all, the 2.6 kernel is newer than Apache 2.0.