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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.
Less pecker.