The Performance Of Fedora Core 3 Through Fedora 14

Starting with Apache, we have the results for Fedora Core 3 through Fedora 13, but build problems made this test unable to successfully complete on the Fedora 14 instance. As you can see from these results, the Apache web server performance has dropped significantly in later kernel releases. The switch from EXT3 to EXT4 took place between Fedora 10 and 11, but even before that the EXT3 file-system took some hits, likely as the data integrity features were being improved. The low-point of the Apache server performance is with Fedora 13.

While the Apache performance suffered many setbacks in succeeding Fedora releases, with the PostMark mail server benchmark there are a number of improvements to be found since the switch to EXT4. In Fedora 14, the performance was not at the highest point since Fedora Core 3, but it was right behind the leader, which was Fedora 12. There have been some safety improvements to the EXT4 file-system in recent releases, which explain the setbacks found post-F12.

C-Ray regressed in Fedora Core 4 but then was fixed in Fedora Core 5 and since then the performance has been relatively unchanged. The initial performance changes in C-Ray are likely due to the compiler changes as shown in our GCC benchmarks (along with Clang, DragonEgg, and LLVM-GCC).