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The Performance of Ubuntu Linux Over the Past 10 Years (phoronix.com)

Posted by timothy on from the so-it's-not-just-new-chips dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Tests were carried out at Phoronix of all Ubuntu Long-Term Support releases from the 6.06 "Dapper Drake" release to 16.04 "Xenial Xerus," looking at the long-term performance of (Ubuntu) Linux using a dual-socket AMD Opteron server. Their benchmarks of Ubuntu's LTS releases over 10 years found that the Radeon graphics performance improved substantially, the disk performance was similar while taking into account the switch from EXT3 to EXT4, and that the CPU performance had overall improved for many workloads thanks to the continued evolution of the GCC compiler.

3 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. What about measuring reliability? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What about measuring reliability? That's one of the most important performance factors of any system of any sort, including Linux installations.

    After all, a Linux system that crashes or that does not even boot will offer no reasonable performance of any type!

    When I last used Ubuntu, it used its own init system called Upstart. It generally worked well for my needs.

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it Ubuntu 15.04 was the first to switch to systemd.

    Based on my experiences with Debian, systemd was a complete disaster. After doing routine updates I experienced booting problems on several of my computers. After some investigation it turned out that all were due to various problems with systemd.

    While desperately looking for solutions to my problems, I found many other people reporting all sorts of problems with systemd. These are the kinds of problems we never experienced with sysvinit or Upstart or other init systems.

    It doesn't matter how fast my computer's CPU is, or how fast the disk is, or how fast the graphics are if the computer doesn't even boot far enough to be usable because the init system crapped out.

  2. Re: And a big reduction in manageability... by F.Ultra · · Score: 3, Interesting

    systemd never ever drops stderr, could you trolls stop spewing that lie sometime?

  3. Re: Don't tell anyone by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There may be lots of Linux distros, but they fall into 3 categories:

    1) Fedora-derived distros
    2) Debian-derived distros
    3) Niche distros

    We don't really see fragmentation, but rather specialization.

    The Fedora- and Debian-based distros see the most use. Even they aren't very different these days, especially the Debian versions that use systemd.

    So the fragmentation you're talking about just doesn't exist any more. It's not 1996.