Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 Beta 2 Benchmarks Against Ubuntu, CentOS, openSUSE

Following the release of the first beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 back in April we delivered our first RHEL 6.0 benchmarks while putting it up against CentOS 5.4 and Fedora 12. Now that the second beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 was released last week, we took the workstation build and have benchmarked it against the latest releases of Ubuntu, CentOS, and openSUSE.

This second RHEL 6.0 beta brings many fixes for bugs found while testing the first beta, an updated Anaconda installer, and various other package updates. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 Beta 2 for workstations is shipping with the Linux 2.6.32-37.el6 kernel, GNOME 2.28.2 desktop, X.Org Server 1.7.7, Mesa 7.7.1, GCC 4.4.4, and it uses an EXT4 file-system by default. This is in comparison to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with the Linux 2.6.32-21-generic kernel, GNOME 2.30.0 desktop, X.Org Server 1.7.6, GCC 4.4.3, and an EXT4 file-system. CentOS 5.5 has the Linux 2.6.18-194.el5 kernel, GNOME 2.16.0 desktop, X.Org Server 7.1.1, Mesa 6.5.1, GCC 4.1.2, and an EXT3 file-system by default. Lastly, openSUSE 11.3 RC2 is shipping with the Linux 2.6.34-12 kernel, GNOME 2.30.0, X.Org Server 1.8.0, Mesa 7.8.2, GCC 4.5, and an EXT4 file-system. The 64-bit builds of all Linux distributions were tested.

Our tests were run by the Phoronix Test Suite and include Apache, PostMark, LZMA compression, CompileBench, TTSIOD 3D Renderer, C-Ray, 7-Zip compression, FFmpeg, John The Ripper, NAS Parallel Benchmark, and Loopback TCP network performance. The test system was an Intel Core i7 920 CPU clocked at 3.60GHz with eight logical cores, an ASRock X58 SuperComputer motherboard, 3GB of system memory, a 320GB Seagate ST3320620AS, and a NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX graphics card. Let's jump to these latest benchmark results of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 Beta 2.

Starting immediately with our Apache benchmark, the lead performer was CentOS 5.5, which sustained 70% more transactions per second than RHEL 6.0 Beta 2 WS. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS performed right behind CentOS while performing more closely to RHEL 6.0 Beta 2 was the second release candidate of openSUSE 11.3. Part of the CentOS lead may be attributed to its use of the EXT3 file-system by default where as the three other Linux operating systems are using EXT4.

While CentOS was the winner with Apache, it lost out to the EXT4-using operating systems with the PostMark disk benchmark. openSUSE 11.3 with the Linux 2.6.34 kernel had the best performance followed by Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and then RHEL 6.0 Beta 2 WS.