Is Ubuntu Getting Slower?

An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix has a new article where they provide Ubuntu 7.04, 7.10, 8.04, and 8.10 benchmarks and had ran many tests. In that article, when using an Intel notebook they witness major slowdowns in different areas and ask the question, Is Ubuntu getting slower? From the article: 'A number of significant kernel changes had went on between these Ubuntu Linux releases including the Completely Fair Scheduler, the SLUB allocator, tickless kernel support, etc. We had also repeated many of these tests to confirm we were not experiencing a performance fluke or other issue (even though the Phoronix Test Suite carries out each test in a completely automated and repeatable fashion) but nothing had changed. Ubuntu 7.04 was certainly the Feisty Fawn for performance, but based upon these results perhaps it would be better to call Ubuntu 7.10 the Gooey Gibbon, 8.04 the Hungover Heron, and 8.10 the Idling Ibex.'"

Comments

What hardware?

[el_chupanegre]

Were they testing each distribution on exactly the same hardware?

If so, that sounds completely fair to me that it would be slower. Go and (try to) install Vista on a machine that originally came with XP (pre-SP1) and see how much slower it is. Is that a fair test either? I think not.

As software gets more useful (and Ubuntu has, Vista not so much) it gets bigger and thus gets slower on the same hardware. Hardware advances at the same time though, so in real terms they keep about equal. When you test new software on old hardware of course it's going to be slower though.

Re:What hardware?

[RAMMS EIN]

You make it sound like it is inevitable and acceptable that newer software is slower than older software. I disagree. For one thing, one way to improve software is to make it faster. This is actually done sometimes. Secondly, even if you add features to software (which is another way to improve software), that doesn't have to make the software slower. In some cases, this may be inevitable, but in many cases it is not.

I personally see computers, and software, as tools for making life more efficient. When software becomes slower, efficiency is actually lost. When this isn't offset by providing me with a more efficient work flow, I lose efficiency. Since efficiency is the main reason I use computers in the first place, this is a big deal.

Re:Performance isn't its raison detre

[Linegod]

It's nice to see that the Ubuntu fanboys have moved so quickly to 'shut up and like it'.

It took Windows fanboys a decade to get there...

Re:Had went on?

[just_another_sean]

Why should I read this FA if the author apparently didn't finish high school?

The anonymous submitter and CmdrTaco's grammar skills have little to do with performance in Ubuntu. RTFA; it makes a good point and I for one hope that this observation is accepted by the Ubuntu developer's and something is done about it.

Re:Ubuntu isn't getting slower, no.

[Timothy Brownawell]

Complete bullshit article, doesn't offer any useful information beyond a completely obvious conclusion -- the more features that are added to a given piece of software, the higher the demands on your PC.

I would think that those increased demands should be mostly in the form of slightly (a few MB) higher memory requirements to store the extra code for those features. Adding new functionality should not impact existing functionality. Haven't you heard of the zero-cost principle (idea from C++ and apparently Perl, "you don't pay for (as in take a performance hit from) what you don't use")?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Ubuntu? No way.

[thatskinnyguy]

"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "I'm sick of fucking with Linux in order to get it to do what I want but I really don't like the alternatives."

Yeah, I rocked Gentoo for a couple of years. I just want something that is fast, easy to use and gives me as little of a headache as possible. Linux is Linux and most of the knowledge learned in one distro will carry-over to another.

Re:Performance isn't its raison detre

[LWATCDR]

Why do you think this? I mean do you have a good reason or is it just because you don't like mono?
Take a look at some of the tests.
"Computational: The Dhrystone 2 performance within the BYTE Unix Benchmark was also the fastest on Ubuntu 7.04. There was approximately a 20% drop in performance between 7.04 and 7.10 that remained consistent even in the 8.04 and 8.10 releases. "
This is NOT in mono.
"Database: In our SQLite test of measuring the time to perform 2,500 SQL inserts, the performance hadn't dropped off after Ubuntu 7.04 but instead after 8.04 LTS. In this performance drop it was over 2.5x slower. "
SQLlite isn't written in mono.
"but in our compilation benchmarks we spotted major performance losses following the Feisty Fawn release. It was noticeably slower to compile Apache, PHP, and ImageMagick in the 7.10, 8.04, and 8.10 releases."
GCC isn't written in mono.
I could go on and on but many of the benchmarks have nothing to do with mono at all.
Heck I am not a big fan of mono but your statment is baseless.

Re:Ubuntu? No way.

[FrozenFOXX]

Mod the parent up, I'm in the exact same boat. Ran Gentoo for three years, loved it, but realized that I was spending a lot more time tinkering with the OS than actually USING the OS. That's perfectly fine for a server of some variety where really the tinkering IS the interaction, but for a desktop or something you're going to use more interactively on a daily basis it became too much of a pain.

Ubuntu gives me some of the strengths I liked (such as a simple, straightforward package manager, wide amount of customization without too much screwing around) without too many of the weaknesses (compiling all software, praying emerging the world doesn't break my desktop, so on and so forth).

It's not a bad distro at all and it's tiring to hear of people slamming it for not being Slackware or Gentoo. This may come as a revelation, but Linux is about choice.