Ubuntu 9.04 vs. Fedora 11 Performance

Fedora 11 was released earlier this week so we have set out to see how its desktop performance compares to that of Ubuntu 9.04, which was released back in April. Using the Phoronix Test Suite we compared these two leading Linux distributions in tasks like code compilation, Apache dedicated server performance, audio/video encoding, multi-processing, ray-tracing, computational biology, various disk tasks, graphics manipulation, encryption, chess AI, image conversion, database, and other tests.

For this testing our system we used was an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 clocked at 4.00GHz, ASUS P5E64 WS Professional motherboard, 2GB of DDR3 memory, a Western Digital 160GB WD1600JS-00M SATA hard drive, and a NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT graphics card. Ubuntu 9.04 ships with the Linux 2.6.28 kernel, GNOME 2.26.1, X Server 1.6.0, GCC 4.3.3, and an EXT3 file-system by default. Fedora 11 was using the Linux 2.6.29 kernel, GNOME 2.26.1, X Server 1.6.2 RC1, xf86-video-nouveau 0.0.10, GCC 4.4.0, and an EXT4 file-system by default. The x86_64 builds of both Fedora 11 and Ubuntu 9.04 were used.

We were using the latest Phoronix Test Suite code for managing our testing process, which will go on to form the 2.0 Sandtorg release. Older versions of our testing software are available in the Fedora and Ubuntu repositories. The test profiles we used included timed PHP compilation, Apache benchmarking, LAME MP3 encoding, Ogg encoding, FFmpeg, GMPbench, Bwfirt, C-Ray, timed MAFFT alignment, Threaded I/O Tester, PostMark, Dbench, GraphicsMagick, OpenSSL, Crafty, Sunflow Rendering System, dcraw, Minion, SQLite, and PostgreSQL pgbench.