Ubuntu 7.04 to 8.10 Benchmarks: Is Ubuntu Getting Slower?

[ssam]

Evgeniy Polyakov has made some posts on kernel performance. maybe a similar cause.
http://tservice.net.ru/~s0mbre/blog//devel/other

[trooper09]

...

Since there is now a complete shift to dual cores as a standard, and Intel Core Duo is not really dual cores, I wonder how the tests would perform under that environment.

[ssam]

Since there is now a complete shift to dual cores as a standard, and Intel Core Duo is not really dual cores, I wonder how the tests would perform under that environment.

intel's naming scheme is confusing

core solo = 32bit single core
core duo = 32bit dual core
core 2 solo = 64 bit single core
core 2 duo = 64 bit dual core
core 2 quad = 64 bit quad core
core 2 extreme = 64 bit dual/quad

the dual cores share cache (but that is a good thing (i think. lets you do openMP))

The quads are actually two bits of silicon in one enclosure.

there is far too much information on wikipedia :-)

[supercompman]

I was wondering if Tracker was enabled or disabled in the later versions of Ubuntu. One thing I noticed right away in Ubuntu 7.10 when I started compiling larger projects is that there was a huge performance hit taken with Tracker enabled. I would download a tarball, decompress it, and tracker would index all of these new text files... not good, especially for a large project. Then, as I was compiling, Tracker would notice these new files created during compilation and start indexing them as well. Disabling Tracker completely helped general performance quite a bit as well and it's one of the first things I do when I perform a fresh install of Ubuntu.

When it comes to comments on the completely fair scheduler, there may be a small performance hit taken, but the general user experience is much more smooth on the desktop. If there is a single application that runs a muck, it's not going to make your desktop completely unusable to the point of stopping the user from killing the wild process. For me, that's a trade off I can accept.

For the graphics tests (minus the games tests), I would be interested to see what the performance is like if we take the proprietary ATI drivers out of the mix. I realize that many (if not most) users will be using the proprietary drivers, but I'm curious to see if some of these slow downs have been introduced by ATI.

I'm not denying for one second that there is a problem here (it seems pretty apparent there's a problem with the kernel, X, GTK, or some combination of those), but these are just a few questions and opinions about what the causes might be.

[adrianveidt]

The cause for the bad performance is the CFS (Completly Fair Scheduler), I think. It's standard since 2.6.23/24.

World of Warcraft on Wine lags terrible and freezes every some seconds since the introducing of CFS.

I hope OpenSolaris supports my hardware completly soon, so that I can change to this OS.

That's a wicked thought. The CFS was created to improve desktop performance, particularly for things like 3d games. Maybe Con Kolivas was right all along...

Michael, what you should try to do is boot a Feisty kernel in Intrepid and then benchmark that (if possible).

[deanjo]

That's a wicked thought. The CFS was created to improve desktop performance, particularly for things like 3d games. Maybe Con Kolivas was right all along...

He was, and politics got in the way again, enough for him to quit.

[mortan]

Well, the compilation benchmarks look strange... nearly a performance drop of 50%

My guess is that the test machine has a dual core CPU and the MAKEFLAGS environment variable was not set correctly. MAKEFLAGS=-j3 for a dual core should be the default if you want to use both cores...

Anyway, nice benchmark

[Michael]

My guess is that the test machine has a dual core CPU and the MAKEFLAGS environment variable was not set correctly. MAKEFLAGS=-j3 for a dual core should be the default if you want to use both cores...

The makeflags set by PTS is set to 4 jobs for physical dual core systems.

[mortan]

The makeflags set by PTS is set to 4 jobs for physical dual core systems.

If MAKEFLAGS was set like this in all Ubuntu versions then.... wow, what causes this massive performance drop?! If i find some time i would like to do some benchmarks on my own, but with a different distribution.

[Vadi]

Relevant ubuntu-devel discussion: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ub...er/026794.html