Arch Linux 2009.08 Benchmarks

Ubuntu 9.04 continued to win with the local adaptive thresholding performance in GraphicsMagick.

Arch Linux did slightly better than the Jaunty Jackalope with the dcraw test profile.

Ubuntu 9.04 did much better than Arch Linux 2009.08 when it came to the SQLite performance. The performance of SQLite databases seem to sway a lot between kernel releases and file-systems as our tests have shown in the past. Most of the issues were worked out with the Linux 2.6.28 kernel, but with EXT4 and the Linux 2.6.30 kernel there are some performance regressions that have come back. This issue by no means is specific to just Arch Linux.

For the most part, Arch Linux 2009.08 did much better than Ubuntu 9.04 when it came to the disk tests. This is because of the use of EXT4 over EXT3, while Ubuntu 9.10 is switching to EXT4 by default with the forthcoming 9.10 release. Arch Linux is also using the newer 2.6.30 kernel compared to Linux 2.6.28 in the current stable release of Ubuntu. However, when pushing aside the disk tests, there were still some wins for Arch Linux. Arch did better than Ubuntu with the graphics performance (World of Padman), Apache web serving, and dcraw. The only area outside of that where Ubuntu 9.04 pulled a win was with GraphicsMagick. Run your own tests comparing your favorite distributions and test scenarios using the Phoronix Test Suite.