A Quick Look At The Debian 10.0 Buster vs. Debian 9.9 Performance

With Debian 10 "Buster" due to be releasing in early July, I've begun testing the near-final Buster images on various systems. Here is a look at a common Intel Core i7 system comparing the current performance of Debian 10.0 to the current stable 9.9 release.

On the Core i7 8700K system, Debian 9.9 vs. 10.0 were benchmarked with the same hardware under test and each Debian release being cleanly installed and kept to its default settings.

With this just being a quick, one-page article, let's get right to the overview:

To little surprise, Debian 9.9 is faster in some areas by big margins and that comes down to its default mitigations and policies around Intel CPU microcode updates. Context switching, kernel scheduler performance, and other areas affected by Spectre/Meltdown/L1TF/Zombieload are all faster compared to Buster with its greater protections.

But thanks to the much newer kernel in Buster, some Stress-NG micro-benchmarks are showing better performance, I/O performance with EXT4 is generally better off, and newer packages like a more recent PHP release and Glibc are helping pick up a number of wins compared to the default Debian Stretch.

See more data via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file while waiting for our complete featured article looking at the Debian 10.0 performance compared to multiple systems and other Linux distributions, which should be out shortly after the formal Debian 10.0 release in July.