Fedora 16 vs. Ubuntu 11.10 Performance Benchmarks

When starting with PostgreSQL, the ThinkPad W510 that has an Intel Core i7 CPU and backed by an Intel SSD was 17% faster with Ubuntu 11.10 over Fedora 16. The Eee PC was too slow to handle this database server benchmark and the ThinkPad T61 with its SATA HDD and Core 2 Duo processor was also quite slow.

For the two ThinkPad notebooks, Ubuntu 11.10 was much faster than Fedora 16 for the second disk benchmark. The HDD-based T61 notebook was 23% faster for this mail server benchmark while the SSD-based W510 was faster as well by the same margin. However, for the low-power ASUS Eee PC with Atom 330, Fedora 16 was faster 82%.

When looking at the 8GB disk write performance using 64Kb blocks with IOzone, Fedora 16 was faster across all three systems.

The 8GB read performance with IOzone was faster in Fedora on the T61 and Eee, but the high-performance W510 was tied between the two latest Linux distribution releases.