Clear Linux Achieved Even More Performance Improvements During April

While Clear Linux has been outperforming other Linux distributions the past several years, it's a never ending job for them of continuing to lead the way in squeezing more performance out of x86_64 hardware on Linux. During the month of April, some more performance improvements were achieved though also a few regressions appeared to have slipped into their builds.

Looking at several of the Clear Linux systems benchmarking the OS daily in our benchmark lab for keeping track of their performance optimizations, April was another exciting month in the Clear space. April didn't bring as many exciting updates as March when they quickly rolled out the Linux 5.0 kernel and GNOME Shell 3.32.0. But April did see continued Linux 5.0 point releases and kernel tweaking, GNOME 3.32.1, and one big upgrade was switching already from GCC 8.3.1 to GCC 9.0.1. Similar to Fedora 30, Clear Linux has already switched to GCC9 using a near-final snapshot of what should be christened as GCC 9.1.0 as soon as Friday.

On various Intel systems in the benchmark lab, there were several performance improvements to find when comparing the rolling-release Clear Linux from the start of April now to the start of May. All benchmarks, of course, via the Phoronix Test Suite.

The Sockperf benchmark for localhost Socket API tests saw better performance across the board with the latest state of Clear Linux.

The Golang HTTP performance also improved during the month.

GraphicsMagick did see some improvements, likely due to the switch from GCC8 to GCC9.


There were a few application slowdowns, likely attributed to the compiler upgrade.

Rust performance was flat.


The Hackbench Linux kernel scheduler benchmark was indicating some slight improvements with the newer Linux 5.0.x point releases.

The Perl performance even managed to see some improvements.

It's also looking like Rscript is running slightly faster at least on the systems tested.

The PHP performance does appear to have pulled back slightly on the newer builds of Clear Linux.


Redis was seeing some small improvements.

Rounding out the benchmarks, the SciKit-Learn performance was slightly faster with the newest state of Clear Linux.

Additional data for those interested via our daily, Phoronix Test Suite / Phoromatic powered LinuxBenchmarking.com performance tracker.