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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.'"
Let's see how that statement works in this situation:
It shouldn't be getting slower, but then again, performance isn't the reason Vista exists.
If you really want performance, run FreeDOS. Otherwise, shut up and get used to progress.
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.
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...
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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.
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See, there's this thing called an analogy. It's kinda like a car...
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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")?
If you look closely you'll notice that (a) the benchmarks were run on a Thinkpad T60 laptop, and (b) there were significant differences on some benchmarks like RAM bandwidth that should have little or no OS components.
This sounds to me like the power management was dialing down the CPU on the later releases...
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Analogies are like matchbox cars full of chocolates... you never know how much spillover chinese paint you're going to get.
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Xubuntu's performance targeting appears limited to choice of desktop environment, which was a small component of what these benchmarks tested. The big performance increases the article talks about were in databases, compilers, encryption, memory access, and audio/video encoding/decoding, none of which really have much to do with the desktop environment.
... they are.
Seriously.
I can see several problems with the testing methodology as is:
* The test suite itself: The Phoronix test suite runs on PHP. That in itself is a problem-- the slowdowns measured could most likely be *because* of differences in the distributed PHP runtimes. You can't just say "hey, version Y of distro X is slower than version Z! LOLZ" because, WTF. You're pretty much also running different versions of the *test suite* itself (since you have to consider the runtime as part of the test suite). Unless you remove that dependency, then sorry, you can't measure things reliably. Which brings me to my second point...
* What exactly are they testing? The whole distro? The compiler (since most of the whole of each distro version is compiled with different versions of GCC)? The kernel? If they're testing the released kernel, then they should run static binaries that *test* the above, comparing kernel differences. If they're testing the compiler, then they should build the *same* compiled code on each version and run said compiled code (which is pretty much what I gather they're doing). If they're testing the utilities and apps that came with the distro, then they should have shell scripts and other tools (which run on a single runtime, not depending on the runtime(s) that came with the distro version). Because if you don't, you have no fucking clue what you're testing.
Honestly, I was unimpressed by the benchmarks. I happen to do performance benchmarking as part of my job, and I can tell you, you have to eliminate all the variables first -- isolate things to be able to say "X is slow". If you rely on a PHP runtime, use *exactly* the same PHP runtime for all your testing; otherwise, you'll get misleading results.
"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.
The game.
A project gets late one day at a time. There's probably a similar proverb for this too.
So the soul-removal procedure went well, I see.
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.
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I would like to see if this is an Ubuntu issue or Linux in general.
What about Fedora, OpenSuse, and Debian? How do they compare to Ubuntu?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
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In which orifice?
The disappearing pencil trick. Let me show you it.
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