Mid-2012: Arch Linux vs. Slackware vs. Ubuntu vs. Fedora

At the request of many Phoronix readers following the release of updated Arch Linux media, here are some new Arch Linux benchmarks. However, this is not just Arch vs. Ubuntu, but rather a larger Linux distribution performance comparison. In this article are benchmark results from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, CentOS 6.2, Fedora 17, Slackware 14.0 Beta, and Arch Linux.

These five popular Linux distributions were benchmarked from an Intel Core i7 3960X "Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition" system with 8GB of RAM, a 64GB OCZ SSD, and Radeon HD 4650 graphics card. Arch, Slackware, Fedora, CentOS, and Ubuntu were all benchmarked in their stock/default configuration as much as possible. Obviously with Arch Linux being a rolling-release it is much harder to do, but these are just results to largely appease the Phoronix readers requesting such a comparison.

Fedora 17, Slackware 14, and Arch Linux are all on a GCC 4.7.x compiler release at present while CentOS 6.2 is at GCC 4.4.6 just as in upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is on GCC 4.6. All of the Linux distributions were using the EXT4 file-system by default. Other system software details are mentioned in the table above that was auto-generated by the Phoronix Test Suite multi-platform software.