CentOS 5.4 vs. OpenSuSE 11.2 vs. Ubuntu 9.10 Benchmarks

Starting with the Phoronix Test Suite's Apache test profile, there was actually quite a bit of movement between the three distributions. Coming out in front was Ubuntu 9.10, which averaged more than 22% more requests per second than the second place contender, CentOS 5.4. Well in last place was OpenSUSE 11.2 RC1, which was running at 57% the speed of Ubuntu Karmic.

While OpenSuSE started in last place, with the PostgreSQL test it offered the best performance. OpenSuSE 11.2 RC1 was 29% faster than Ubuntu 9.10 and 120% faster than the EXT3-using CentOS 5.4.

OpenSuSE and Ubuntu lagged far behind CentOS 5.4 with the SQLite test, which is no surprise. EXT4 with the Linux 2.6.31 kernel offers hideous performance with SQLite in comparison to EXT3 and other kernel revisions using EXT4. It took 23 seconds on CentOS for 10,000 insertions into a SQLite database in comparison to about 800 seconds for OpenSuSE and Ubuntu.