Windows Server 2019 Performance Benchmarked Against Linux On An Intel Xeon Server

A few days back I delivered the first of our Windows Server 2019 benchmarks against Linux (as well as FreeBSD). That initial testing was done with a dual socket AMD EPYC server while in this article the tables have turned with using a dual Intel Xeon Scalable server while benchmarking Microsoft Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2019 with its new Windows Subsystem for Linux, Windows Server 2016, and an assortment of Linux distributions including Fedora Server 29, openSUSE Leap 15, Ubuntu 18.10, CentOS 7.6, Debian 9.6, and Intel's own Clear Linux.

This Windows Server 2019 vs. Linux benchmark comparison ended up being larger than the prior article thanks to this Tyan 1U server playing well with Windows Server 2016 as well as not running into any installer issues with openSUSE Leap or Debian 9 stable. As for BSD/FreeBSD benchmarks, a follow-up article looking at how well DragonFlyBSD 5.4.1 and FreeBSD 12.0 perform on this Xeon Gold server will be coming in a follow-up article. The operating system configurations tested included:

- Windows Server 2016 with all available updates as of testing.

- Windows Server 2019 with all available updates as of testing.

- Windows Server 2019 when running under the Ubuntu 18.04 WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux).

- CentOS 7.6 as the latest EL7 state with its Linux 3.10 kernel, XFS file-system, GCC 4.8.5 compiler.

- Clear Linux 26850 as Intel's performance-optimized Linux distribution that is presently using Linux 4.19, EXT4, and GCC 8.2.1.

- Debian 9.6 with the Linux 4.9 kernel, GCC 6.3, EXT4 file-system.

- Fedora Server 29 with Linux 4.19.10, XFS, and GCC 8.2.1.

- OpenSUSE Leap 15.0 with Linux 4.12, GCC 7.3.1, and XFS file-system.

- Ubuntu 18.10 as the latest Ubuntu release with the Linux 4.18 kernel, EXT4 file-system, and GCC 8.2.0 compiler.

More of the operating system details below.

All of these operating system benchmarks were carried out from the same server, which was a Tyan GT24E-B7106 that continues running splendid for Xeon Scalable testing now a year and a half into this platform. This server was equipped with two Xeon Gold 6138 CPUs yielding a combined 40 cores / 80 threads, 12 x 8192MB DDR4-2666MHz memory, and a Samsung 970 EVO 250GB NVMe solid-state.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite, a variety of benchmarks were carried out under this wide array of 2018 Linux distributions and Microsoft Windows Server.