Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva Performance Compared

[Vadi]

Mandriva? I'm suprised. I thought it was Ubuntu, OpenSuse, and Fedora.

[Rhettigan]

I think what is most interesting to me in these results is the difference in compilation times, especially for the kernel. I guess, in that case, one could argue that there is simply more source to compile for 2.6.25 than for 2.6.24, or that Fedora 9's gcc is slower than Ubuntu 8.04's. The imagemagick compile time is also interesting.

Anyone have more in-depth insight?

[Luis]

Well, since these benchmarks are mostly about the hardware and the kernel, it's not a big surprise that all perform quite similarly.

It's a pity that openSUSE is not on the test, because it's the only one that enables barriers on the filesystem by default and it would be nice to measure their cost, which in I/O bound tests can be up to 30% in my experience. (There was a recent thread on lkml to enable them by default in ext3, but Andrew Morton was opposing because of these performance cost. I'm not sure how it all ended up, but I saw a commit a couple of days ago to enable them by default in ext4, so in the long run that would be the default anyway).

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva Performance Compared

Last week we released Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 and one of the article requests we received as a result was to do a side-by-side comparison between the popular desktop Linux distributions. Ask and you shall receive. Today we have up 28 test results from Ubuntu 8.04, Fedora 9, and Mandriva 2008.1.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=12438