OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva Benchmarks

[mmmbop]

fedora rawhide

Fedora Rawhide clearly has all the debugging options on.

On my Fedora 11 system, memory usage more than doubles if I use the rawhide kernel.

IMHO it makes for a pointless benchmark.

[deanjo]

Fedora Rawhide clearly has all the debugging options on.

On my Fedora 11 system, memory usage more than doubles if I use the rawhide kernel.

IMHO it makes for a pointless benchmark.

Bingo, *_DEBUG=y is used everywhere in the rawhide kernel.

[bjrosen]

The why is just as important as the what

"All four distributions were left with their stock settings to represent an "out of the box" experience across all of them."

The whole point of using Linux vs that other OS is that it's infinitely tweakable. It would be really helpful to both Linux users and to Linux distro developers to know the reason for the performance differences that you find so that they can make the appropriate adjustments.

The distros that you tested were running the same revision components so you would have expected approximately the same performance. When you find a major discrepancy it's worth investigating. You had a couple of places where Fedora was underperforming by a huge amount. If it's something as simple as SeLinux (which can be disabled trivially, there is a menu item on the Administration menu, just flip it off and reboot) all Fedora users would want to know. Also this might convince RedHat to stop enabling it by default.

[mmmbop]

The problem is so clearly and obviously that rawhide has all the debug options on that it really must be repeated.

Rawhide is not a 'stock' Fedora at all. It is only useful for answering the questions: "Does this new code work?" and "The new code didn't work. What went wrong?"

It is not an indicator of future Fedora performance. It does not tell you how fast Fedora is. Its speed does not matter. Its speed is meaningless. How many ways can I say the same thing?

Even benchmarks of rawhide vs rawhide aren't useful. All that matters performance-wise is the optimized code that comes out when you tell the compiler to optimize things. Benchmark that.

It's like seeing how fast an athlete can run a marathon and also require that they go grocery shopping at every store along the way. They're not going to set any records that day.

[DanL]

Even for me, as an (Arch Linux) user, it is not really straight forward and fast to install it.

http://chakra-project.org/about-faq.html

[frantaylor]

This really is a useless article. Nobody is interested in benchmarking debug code.

I for one would like to a comparison of the RELEASED versions of OS's, and how things change over time. Even an older release like Fedora 10 will run faster now than it did when released, due to updates.

It would be interesting to benchmark the freshly installed OS right out of the can, before any updates are applied, and then benchmark again after bringing it up to date.

[ChuckDriver]

Does anybody know how RHEL does on the server oriented benchmarks? I'd hope better than Fedora, regardless of whether SELinux is enabled or not.

[energyman]

I'm not sure Mickael would like to re-install ArchLinux everytime he does a test.

Even for me, as an arch user, it is not really straight forward and fast to install it. It usually takes me 2h (I have a really good internet provider) to get something working nicely. Ubuntu would have taken 30 minutes.

two hours? You can get gentoo up and running in the same time....

[energyman]

Fedora Rawhide clearly has all the debugging options on.

On my Fedora 11 system, memory usage more than doubles if I use the rawhide kernel.

IMHO it makes for a pointless benchmark.

and the other ones do not?

rawhide lost badly against the other 'testing' versions, that should give you something to think about.

[energyman]

This really is a useless article. Nobody is interested in benchmarking debug code.

I for one would like to a comparison of the RELEASED versions of OS's, and how things change over time. Even an older release like Fedora 10 will run faster now than it did when released, due to updates.

It would be interesting to benchmark the freshly installed OS right out of the can, before any updates are applied, and then benchmark again after bringing it up to date.

already done:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=fedora_9_11_perf&num=2

please enjoy the fact that rawhide was not so bad compared to the released versions, which makes it bad results comparted with osuse, brownone and mandrivel pretty damning.