A 10-Way Linux Distribution Battle To Kick Off 2016

For compiling the Apache web-server, openSUSE Linux 42.1 with the older GCC 4.8 compiler had the fastest compile times followed by CentOS 7 also with GCC 4.8. Since GCC 5, we've seen compile times take longer, albeit more optimizations and improvements have been added for generally making the resulting binary faster. The slowest distribution tested for its compile times was Clear Linux 5700, which isn't surprising considering they enable a lot more compiler flags than the other distributions to ensure the resulting code is faster.

Smallpt is an example of where the out-of-the-box performance for Clear Linux 5700 is much faster for freshly compiled binaries. By default, Clear Linux sets compiler flags of "-g2 -O3 -pipe -fexceptions -fstack-protector -m64 -march=westmere -mtune=native -malign-data=abi" compared to other distributions that aren't catering as much to performance

The single-threaded MP3 encoding benchmarks were running within a second of each other.

At LZMA compression, Debian Testing, Fedora 23, and Debian 8.2 were noticeably slower than the rest.