Preview: Ubuntu's Performance Over The Past Two Years

[frign]

Good points!

Well, an already installed Gentoo is probably as user friendly as Ubuntu, just slower to upgrade (since it will build things on the background). It's just to set up that it's harder for an inexperienced user.

Yes, I definitely agree.
Just for the sake of completeness, though, you don't have to supervise the compilation-process. I normally upgrade my system while doing work and it doesn't get in the way .

To be fair, using Windows 8 I found it to be *technically* good. The fiasco is in two areas: it forces you to use the touch optimized interface even when you use a mouse and a keyboard, when the old interface did a lot better in that aspect, it screws their community (specially their third party apps programmers) with Modern apps (they take 30% of your revenue from you, when the OS is supposed to already be paid by users, and when the apps running on Windows are the main reason for a user to buy Windows), and the stupid Modern overall while running on a desktop, is like being forced to use a tiling window manager in the best case. All the interface related problems are there strictly because they force the desktop user to behave like it's in a cellphone; for a mobile platform, it's great (or sort of).

Thanks for elaborating this problem so well!

I think it will be better with Mir than with X. It will probably lag behind Wayland, and will be worse than with X until they quit using XMir, but after that I can't see how it will be worse than it's with X when running Mir.

I am very eager to find out how they will develop. Just mind, though, that Wayland's performance is highly dependent on a given implementation (-> compositor).


PS: You might want to remove the stray [/QUOTE]-tag.

[frign]

That's how it is

Now I am a windows fanboi. A week ago I remember I was an Ubuntu fanboi. How quickly I change....

Trolls are known to jump on bandwagons.

[mrugiero]

Yes, I definitely agree.
Just for the sake of completeness, though, you don't have to supervise the compilation-process. I normally upgrade my system while doing work and it doesn't get in the way .

I'm aware, that's what I meant when I said it was in the background.

Thanks for elaborating this problem so well!

Your welcome

I am very eager to find out how they will develop. Just mind, though, that Wayland's performance is highly dependent on a given implementation (-> compositor).

Didn't really thought about that, but yeah. Anyway, even though I believe major Wayland compositors will perform better than Mir, I'm just making assumptions on the skills of the involved developers. I don't think there is a technical reason to assume any of the two will be faster than the other, but there are some to think both will outperform X.

PS: You might want to remove the stray [ /QUOTE]-tag.

Saw this too late. Added a space to avoid adding another one.

The bloat is a consequence of bad initial design. X doesn't suck because of bloat, it sucks because it wasn't supposed to do what it is forced to do today. We were talking about bloat as in it is slow and takes a lot of memory. That is not the problem.

Fair enough, not the same kind of bloat.

The one that brought Gentoo into the discussion wasn't me. All I am saying is that no there is no reason to make a performance comparison between Gentoo and Ubuntu given the irrelevance of Gentoo.

I didn't blame you for bringing Gentoo into the discussion. Also, I recall *another* user saying Gentoo and Ubuntu were apples and oranges (which is true), I recall you just telling how it's not popular, a thing everyone, including the one who brought the subject, already knew and stated.

[a user]

It hit me in the face that you have no knowledge about the topic you are talking about.

Again, I am not talking about popularity and I didn't say you could use Gentoo without proper preparation and using the manuals provided.
mrugiero gave a good answer, so there is no need for me to explain it to you again.

The point is flexibility: Once you need your computer to do more advanced stuff, distributions like Ubuntu can get in your way. When you don't know what I'm talking about, you won't understand it.

If your horizon can't reach further than the Ubuntu Software Center, you don't qualify to have a discussion with me or any other advanced GNU/Linux-developer.

My Gentoo-setup boots up in less than 3 seconds and is fully functional. Show me you can do that with Ubuntu and we can talk again.

hmm, until last year i was a scientist (actually in the informatics domain) and now am working as a developer (i always did this beside my main things as a freelacer).

i don't know what more flexability you are talking about that gentoo offers over ubuntu.

sure, it'S a nice thing to sustomize compiler flags, and stripping out some features to make it more slick. but if you think that this gives you some significant performance improvements that a scientist oder developer (not my examples!) would care about, than you are trapped in your illusions.

beside of this. when i did had to squeeze max perofrmance for some long time number crunchings i optimized my code... the code of the number cruncher. it doesn'T matter how the rest of the system has been compiled.. more or less.

once i had to build a special kernel for some things. so what, you can do this on ubuntu too. so what's the "more flexibility" you and the other guy are talking about. give me an example.

sure, ubuntu, or better to say canonical has some flaws. but it seems that's a different story than what we are talking here about.

edit: oh btw. i had my ubuntu desktop booting in 4s... beat me for that 1s. i didn't optimized much to achieve that 4s. does it matter for anything? NO!


edit: when i read some posts here, especially from GNU/linux devs/pro/master gurus i sometimes think they better might be some kids that discovered hwo to configure/make install a program and are now pretending to be the uber geek. it often sounds here like in the kindergarden.

[frign]

On Gentoo

hmm, until last year i was a scientist (actually in the informatics domain) and now am working as a developer (i always did this beside my main things as a freelacer).

i don't know what more flexability you are talking about that gentoo offers over ubuntu.

sure, it'S a nice thing to sustomize compiler flags, and stripping out some features to make it more slick. but if you think that this gives you some significant performance improvements that a scientist oder developer (not my examples!) would care about, than you are trapped in your illusions.

beside of this. when i did had to squeeze max perofrmance for some long time number crunchings i optimized my code... the code of the number cruncher. it doesn'T matter how the rest of the system has been compiled.. more or less.

once i had to build a special kernel for some things. so what, you can do this on ubuntu too. so what's the "more flexibility" you and the other guy are talking about. give me an example.

sure, ubuntu, or better to say canonical has some flaws. but it seems that's a different story than what we are talking here about.

edit: oh btw. i had my ubuntu desktop booting in 4s... beat me for that 1s. i didn't optimized much to achieve that 4s. does it matter for anything? NO!

Okay then. Did you ever use Gentoo before?

First, there's performance. Customizing compiler flags and, more importantly, tweaking USE-flags in portage, does make a huge difference.
It's like questioning the laws of physics: If a program is heavier, loading more libraries, it will take longer to load.
There is no denying in this fact.

Then, there's runtime-performance. It's a myth, that a bloated system doesn't affect the performance of a single program. It's all about the number of interrupts per second, how the sheduler works and if there are lots of cache misses, which directly affect CPU-memory-IO. In an operating system, small bottlenecks can seriously add up.
So it _does_ matter how the rest of the system has been compiled.

You can of course build your own Kernel in Ubuntu, but you can't easily rebuild entire packages easily. But you're right: We are not talking about Ubuntu issues specifically.

If you want to get an idea why Gentoo is generally faster, I recommend you to read my previous posts on the first few pages. If you have more questions or are not satisfied with my points, please send me a personal message and I'll give you some more.

Concerning bootup speed: To clear things up, I'm talking about the time between pressing the power button and _idle_ on desktop. My Kudos if you really managed to optimize your Ubuntu-system that well, but it's hard for me to believe it.
I am really interested how you did that!

BTW: Am I right in the assumption that you are German?

[frign]

An old saying

This should be good. And here I was thinking this thread had ended...

Don't halloo till you're out of the wood!

[juanrga]

My conclusions

frign, JS987, BO$$, a user, and others. Thanks by replies, links and info. Those are my conclusions, all open to debate/correction of course:

1. For most software, compiler optimizations don't increase performance significantly. In some special cases I can see increases in performance of up to 2x. However, higher optimization can increase instability.
2. Real improvement in performance can come from enabling new instruction sets for some specific tasks.
3. Main increase in performance in Gentoo does not come from compiler optimization, but from eliminating unused dependences and features when building the software for a user-specific system.
4. Once installed, using and updating Gentoo is so easy as Ubuntu. I guess maybe it is more by being a rolling release. I am currently a Ubuntu user and I know from own experience that upgrading can be a nightmare sometimes.
5. I understand that one can also compile from source in others distros (including ubuntu), but this could be more difficult and less flexible than in a distro specifically designed for that such as Gentoo.

This is additional data I want to add to the thread

1. I notice that Gentoo is loosing share. I recall that some time ago Gentoo was listed in the distrowatch page of the more popular distros. But in recent updates of the page Gentoo has been dropped. I also notice Funtoo was born in response to political/social problems with Gentoo leaders
2. Game and hardware developers hate windows 7 bloat. Valve found that porting game from windows 7 to ubuntu increased FPS by a 16%. IdSoftware (more concretely Carmack) has stated that a game in a console runs about 2x faster than in a PC with the same hardware. This bloat is a consequence of Windows 7 API. Timothy Lottes (Nvidia) claims that he can obtain up to a 10x more performance from hardware when avoiding the API overhead of Windows.

Those are some doubts:

1. I assume that an 'optimized' install of Gentoo (I mean mainly the USE-flags) will be faster than standard install of a binary-based distro like Ubuntu. However, I know that Debian/Ubuntu can do minimal installs. I assume that minimal install will be still more bloated, because binary packages will contain the extra dependences and unused features, but what is the performance gain of an 'optimized' install of Gentoo over a minimal install of a binary distro? 5%? 15%?
2. I have seen the performance gain when enabling new instruction sets such as AVX2. I have read that developers are seeing huge performance gains of 500% when enabling HSA support in the software. Does enabling HSA is similar to enabling AVX2?
3. What are the main differences between the Gentoo way and the Debian/Ubuntu "apt-get source --compile" way?

[frign]

Trying to address your doubts

frign, JS987, BO$$, a user, and others. Thanks by replies, links and info. Those are my conclusions, all open to debate/correction of course:

1. For most software, compiler optimizations don't increase performance significantly. In some special cases I can see increases in performance of up to 2x. However, higher optimization can increase instability.
2. Real improvement in performance can come from enabling new instruction sets for some specific tasks.
3. Main increase in performance in Gentoo does not come from compiler optimization, but from eliminating dependences when building the software for a user-specific system.
4. Once installed, using and updating Gentoo is so easy as Ubuntu. I guess maybe it is more by being a rolling release. I am currently a Ubuntu user and I know from own experience that upgrading can be a nightmare sometimes.
5. I understand that one can also compile from source in others distros (including ubuntu), but this could be more difficult and less flexible than in a distro specifically designed for that such as Gentoo.

This is additional data I want to add to the thread

1. I notice that Gentoo is loosing share. I recall that some time ago Gentoo was listed in the distrowatch page of the more popular distros. But in recent updates of the page Gentoo has been dropped. I also notice Funtoo was born in response to political/social problems with Gentoo leaders
2. Game and hardware developers hate windows 7 bloat. Valve found that porting game from windows 7 to ubuntu increased FPS by a 16%. IdSoftware (more concretely Carmack) has stated that a game in a console runs about 2x faster than in a PC with the same hardware. This bloat is a consequence of Windows 7 API. Timothy Lottes (Nvidia) claims that he can obtain up to a 10x more performance from hardware when avoiding the API overhead of Windows.

Those are some doubts:

1. I assume that an 'optimized' install of Gentoo (I mean mainly the USE-flags) will be faster than standard install of a binary-based distro like Ubuntu. However, I know that Debian/Ubuntu can do minimal installs. I assume that minimal install will be still more bloated, because binary packages will contain the extra dependences and unused features, but what is the performance gain of an 'optimized' install of Gentoo over a minimal install of a binary distro? 5%? 15%?
2. I have seen the performance gain when enabling new instruction sets such as AVX2. I have read that developers are seeing huge performance gains of 500% when enabling HSA support in the software. Does enabling HSA is similar to enabling AVX2?
3. What are the main differences between the Gentoo way and the Debian/Ubuntu

   apt-get source --compile

   way?

First off: My deepest respect to you for bringing it together that nicely! I couldn't have done it better and don't see any point left out (Correct me, if I'm wrong).

I must admit that this discussion is also a political one, so I won't start re-heating the points you put together and will head right to your questions you and many here want answered:

1. What benefits do you get from installing Gentoo?
2. What about instruction sets?
3. What's the difference between compiling on Gentoo and compiling on aptitude-based systems (Debian, Ubuntu, ...)?

I'll answer the second question first, because there is an easy answer to it: It depends on what you do! If you do video-decoding with ffmpeg, you can definitely gain a lot when your CPU supports certain instruction sets. Overall though, they don't make much of a difference compared to other factors I'll talk about later.

Your first question nails it down to the main point of the discussion: Why even use Gentoo?
To be honest, the main reason for me to switch from Debian to Gentoo wasn't enhanced speed, but the chance to learn more about GNU/Linux. Having used it for six months now, I can definitely affirm that I learned a lot!
The way it forces you to read lots of manuals at the beginning and spend time with the core-components is very beneficial and I would've never gone this route if I had stayed with Debian.
The good side-effect of knowing Gentoo is that when I get to setup Debian on a client's computer I know how to fix problems, because I learned how it works (Debian/Ubuntu and Gentoo are actually very similar on the low level).

On the technical side, having a fast computer, of course, makes it hard to see which system's faster. My current computer is a quad-core i7 one, so I shouldn't see any difference, too.
For testing purposes, I set up Gentoo on a smaller system (fit-PC2 by CompuLab) and compared it to a fresh installation of Debian (Xfce). Especially using the Desktop Environment, you could notice some differences.
Humans are actually quite sensitive when it comes to little time-delays.
Debian ran just fine and I don't have any reason to complain. But using Gentoo on the other hand, it was noticeably faster. That was my personal experience and I might just fall for the placebo-effect, but everyone's free to do benchmarks.

If you search for benchmarks on the net, you normally find ones comparing different optimization-levels (which is BS). Honestly, no one really did a comparison between Gentoo and Debian for example (Correct me if I'm wrong).

Concerning your third question, we are talking about USE-flags again. You might be able to compile in aptitude, but don't have a way to tweak what's included in the end.
The only benefit you might get there is a speed-increase due to compiler-optimizations, which normally is pretty small.


In case I left something out, please let me know!

[jrch2k8]

to BO$$ that as always trying to defend the dumbest tries of troll with 0 technical background in a technical site[try ubuntu forums there you can find iliterates like you and make them eat all bullshit you talk about]

1.) Gentoo is for smart ppl and i mean mostly the smart ppl that develop software that will be converted later to .debs so dumb ppl like you can use it in software center, gentoo was never meant for dumb ppl so stay away from it, so as long as you want linux software to exist gentoo and LFS will exist along too is retardedly obvious.

2.) Gentoo is faster for technical reason i will state later for posterity since i know for a fact you can't understand

3.) Ubuntu popularity sure but removing the obvious those are mostly consumer that like you are completely illiterate in engineering hence useless for linux technical grow, gentoo has few consumers but many highly skilled developers that focus on technical grow, why you mix both things i can't understand(maybe im too smart and i can downgrade myself to your level of idiocy to get it?)

4.) X11 protocol was designed when your father was chasing your mother in college and computers needed a couple a building floors and an electrical substation to work, so if you ask me it was very well designed but technology reached a point where X11 concepts can not be applied anymore due to hardware changes that cannot be foreseen in those days <-- smart ppl rant this just means was designed 30+ years ago and reached its end and wayland will take over for the next 30+ years

5.) like i told you in another thread, you can't judge in any possible way why linux is superior or not to windows/mac since you need to be very smart to reach that point, again install firefox and teach your grandpa access facebook doesn't qualifies you as engineer, you as a regular users won't find much or at all limitations in any modern OS

6.) Windows is a dependency hellish nightmare that is almost impossible to tolerate and it gets exponentially worse if you tie yourself to WFC api and this is why you see most apps[including those you named] install a retarded amount of libraries in an apps exclusive folder or massive .EXE that are statically linked or both but sure as normal user this is transparent for you

7.) Again good usage resources is moot to ppl like you since you cannot exploit those resources using facebook or watching porn, this is needed for bussiness that every wasted resources or slowdown means lots of $$$ wasted by a variety of factors

8.) Yes for smart ppl is quite trivial to realize if the NSA is accessing you PC or if there is a trojan horse NSA patch around and fixing it is even more trivial and this is true even in windows or mac[the fixing part is a challenge ofc i don't have sources to fix it myself], now users in you level are in the dark whichever OS you use but at least with linux is a lot less trivial to spy, after all whatever they do they end in a ethernet package that i can sniff and unlike movies there is no russian guy playing mario bros[hacker edition] that will bypass my firewall using a jostick, stop watching AXN

ok, now the ovbious is gone lets go to topic

well Gentoo it is faster and depending your hardware it will be lots faster for very simple technical reasons

1F(as fact).) binary distros are normall normalized to the minimal exponent possible for each architecture, doing so to be able to install in as many system as is possible, this means basically -02 clean optimizations and only MMX/SSE2 support for vectorization[if enabled at all] and in multimedia packages they tend to use very slow codepaths to select feature at runtime [ffmpeg/mplayer] so their work out-of-the-box

1A(as asnwer).)in gentoo you optimize for your CPU using every feature available, so if you leaved the 90 and you got 21st century hardware this will prove a very good speed upgrade[zambezi+/haswell architectures shines in gentoo for example]

2F.) binary distros are normally a mess to deal with if you wanna stay bleeding edge[performance or code] an normally requires you to track a lot of dependencies[and possible breakages] but again if you are capable of doing this you won't use Ubuntu for it, wanna prove try to build blender git in ubuntu[ppa don't have all feature active] when you end and it runs without segfault you basically ended with gentoo using apt instead of portage, again no normal user will run into this issue since most think git is a cookie brand but ppl in gentoo actually develop for blender[in this example] and debug the hell out of it

2A.) Gentoo is designed to deal with this issue and is really really good at it, is not designed to please your average dumb pleasant and even less BO$$

3F.) Binary distro require versioning freeze to maintain an ABI stable for its period of life

3A.) Gentoo is rolling and portage/overlays are always up to date with the latest line written and in many cases you can gain performance/stability/feature now that won't reach most binary distros for a while, for example kernel 3.11 give several performance/features not present before and i can use it now or Vc[SIMD library used by projects like calligra] since version 0.7.2 support fully FMA and AVX/2 and it improve heavily the performance in krita or ffmpeg git has a huge set of performance enhacement and features that you won't enjoy until 14.04 minimal, etc

4F.) dependency was explained good and enough

5F.) binary distros don't include by default many kernel/libraries features by default like iptables JIT compiler[awesome] or 1000HZ or preempt or CIFS features or Swap optimizations, etc etc etc

5A.) in gentoo is trivial to enjoy this features and provide a nice improvement ease as cake

6F.) binary distro usually nerf your multimedia stack

6A.) in my gentoo i can play every codec made by mankind since is my unique system and no patent holder give a rat ass about it

and for BO$$ a mind blowing fact performance is not only FPS and cool excel graphic bars and Btw in some cases some games can run actually faster in gentoo, i won't explain why try to analize it.

note im sure for your kind of ppl this is way too advanced and whatever ubuntu gives is good enough and i agree but the fun thing of being smart and understand smart ppl stuff like C/C++[OMG] is that i can enjoy all those neat advancements way before you do and even help to fix it/improve it and that again is perfectly normal without smart ppl you lot will still live in caves and without you will be hard to make money[is not so easy to sell to smart ppl you know], so gentoo ppl make stuff today and you use it some months later in your software center. perfect balance

btw about your patches bla bla bla, as long as you are a semi decent coder is not hard to reach gentoo/projects upstream but the semi decent phrase basically exclude 90% of canonical developers, i trully dunno why, but those guys send some messed bunch of unindented salad everytime they try, maybe they should hire someone to QA the code first

*Note: most of this exclude ARCH and Manjaro

[jrch2k8]

hmm, until last year i was a scientist (actually in the informatics domain) and now am working as a developer (i always did this beside my main things as a freelacer).

i don't know what more flexability you are talking about that gentoo offers over ubuntu.

sure, it'S a nice thing to sustomize compiler flags, and stripping out some features to make it more slick. but if you think that this gives you some significant performance improvements that a scientist oder developer (not my examples!) would care about, than you are trapped in your illusions.

beside of this. when i did had to squeeze max perofrmance for some long time number crunchings i optimized my code... the code of the number cruncher. it doesn'T matter how the rest of the system has been compiled.. more or less.

once i had to build a special kernel for some things. so what, you can do this on ubuntu too. so what's the "more flexibility" you and the other guy are talking about. give me an example.

sure, ubuntu, or better to say canonical has some flaws. but it seems that's a different story than what we are talking here about.

edit: oh btw. i had my ubuntu desktop booting in 4s... beat me for that 1s. i didn't optimized much to achieve that 4s. does it matter for anything? NO!


edit: when i read some posts here, especially from GNU/linux devs/pro/master gurus i sometimes think they better might be some kids that discovered hwo to configure/make install a program and are now pretending to be the uber geek. it often sounds here like in the kindergarden.

well you are probably using a recent gen SSD on sata3, gentoo + systemd can boot to session manager in 3s using regular sata2 7200rpm disks and in my particular case my main gentoo system [vertex4 SSD] boot from grub2 to fully operational KDE 4.11 desktop[password bypass] in 1s and 300Mb of my 16GB ddr3 of ram use.

sure is not big deal but since in gentoo is very trivial to reach, why not enjoy it? and for run git bisected debug kernels[i prefer restart than kexec to avoid false positives] you begin to appreciate the small details like this