Ubuntu 9.10 Off To A Great Performance Start

The 4GB read performance was also in favor of Ubuntu 9.10: 70MB/s versus 54MB/s.

With another disk test, Flexible IO Tester, Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 1 continued to present a strong lead over the Jaunty Jackalope. It took 95 seconds for Ubuntu 9.04 to complete the Intel IOMeter File Server Access Pattern test where as Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 1 took just 76 seconds.

Our final benchmark for this early Ubuntu 9.10 testing was with the timed MAFFT alignment where Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 1 was faster by about one second.

Wow, while there may not be many end-user improvements in Ubuntu 9.10 yet and the desktop looks just like that of Ubuntu 9.04, there does seem to be some performance improvements. Besides the huge SQLite improvement that did not come as a surprise, there are better compilation times with GCC 4.4, much better disk performance with the newer Linux kernel, and other improvements throughout. One area that still needs to be improved upon is with the Intel Linux graphics performance after going through radical changes with kernel mode-setting, DRI2, and the Graphics Execution Manager.

This is still way too early to say how Ubuntu 9.10 final will perform, but we will be back through the development cycle of the Karmic Koala with plenty more benchmarks. We will also be covering other features as they emerge like the integration of Plymouth and the default enabling of kernel mode-setting on Intel graphics hardware. To run your own tests, check out the Phoronix Test Suite.

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