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The Performance of Ubuntu Linux Over the Past 10 Years (phoronix.com)
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.
after forcing systemd on us!
Writing sane optimized software makes far bigger impact than dicking with filesystems, schedulers and compiler optimizations to hunt the 0.05% extra performance. For example the Unity desktop is super laggy on low-end hardware, all due to bloated design.
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.
Software performs better after it's had time to mature and be optimized and bugs removed.
If Linux fans find out that a distro is in any way successful, they're obligated to split it into a million competing forks and bitch about it endlessly.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Ever see a chicken with its head chopped off? It runs faster.
The only thing that matters is how snappy the GUI is, try measuring framerates of the change from 2D Gnome to 3D Unity. Also compare open source drivers vs proprietary at rendering the GUI. Users don't care about how many bits a hard drive is transferring per second as they will never notice.
Users do care about data rates to/from a hard drive. Ever install a huge game? Ever try to play a movie from disk while uploading photos to picasa? What about backing up data by copying between hard drives?
I can all but guarantee there will be complaints about how long it takes to copy 20GB of crap between drives. Or the fact that the video is stuttering as thousands of photos are being accessed for upload. You'll probably hear "This computer is really slow" when it's actually the hard drive as a bottleneck. Better throughput and smarter accessing/layout aren't things a typical consumer will talk about, but they certainly will appreciate.
My work machine is i7 laptop (4 cores, not "U" variant) with 16GB RAM, no SSD, just HDD. Both Ubuntu 14.04 and Windows 8.1 are surprisingly slow in some standard operations, most annoyingly in logging in, starting Chrome... Also annoying thing with Ubuntu is that if it uses HDD, then everything else is way too slow. If I tar/untar some really big file, and I browse web in parallel, I see that browser is noticeably slower than usual.
I still wonder how we used to do more-or-less the same stuff on machines that had 512MB of RAM and 5x slower CPU. Where has all the CPU power gone? Why SW got so bloated?
No sig today.
FTW
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
...Or maybe Sandy Bridges.
I think you responded to the wrong story.
All Linux is open source, all use the same kernel, all use the gcc compiler.
Why would Ubuntu substantially outperform other Linux distros using the same kernel, compiler, file system, ect? Why would CPU, Radeon graphic, and HDD performance be substantially different?
Yes, but... what users are complaining about isn't really how "fair" it is from a CS perspective. What they really want to know is how they can say my video streaming is a lot more important than my bittorrent client and if there's CPU contention or IO contention or network contention just let the video take priority. Because usually somebody with a server has optimized the IO quite well for the use case with 100 streams and they're all equally important. That's usually not the case on the client, some things matter much, much more than others.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
DOH!!! Angry posts get me every time!!!
Less deadweight?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
So by lineage alone I'd argue there are more than two major categories.
It doesn't matter what $MT_LOGFILE is set to, that is besides the point that I'm making. With SysVInit you have to tricks like this but with systemd it's no longer necessary since the journal will group together stdout, stderr and syslog into a single log.
But just to prove you wrong, let's look at "man mediatomb":
-l, --logfile
Do not output log messages to stdout, but redirect everything to a
specified file.
So as you can see the whole point of -l is to not use stdout or stderr, in fact it cannot be any of those since it must be a physical file!
Back then all the hardware was roughly the same speed. You couldn't saturate your disk bus with a simple tar because your CPU and memory had latencies measured in 100ns-ms, your disk could catch up. Disks are still roughly the same speed as they were 10 years ago. Also, js and html have become bigger and more of it can be found on random websites. I remember a time when you would optimize websites to fit all text, graphics and code under 50-100kb (~1-2s load time). jQuery alone is that size now and we sometimes load several libraries in a page. Our network is faster but our disk isn't. There is also a lot more graphics and bells and whistles, we are back to the 90s with the flashing under construction and dancing skeletons but now it's in code.
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Less pecker.
No. But they were running it on a system with an eight core CPU and 16GB RAM. The memory usage of Linux has increased over time, so testing on a system with less memory might favor older releases.