10GbE Linux Networking Performance Between CentOS, Fedora, Clear Linux & Debian
For those curious how the 10 Gigabit Ethernet performance compares between current Linux distributions, here are some benchmarks we ramp up more 10GbE Linux/BSD/Windows benchmarks. This round of testing was done on two distinctly different servers while testing CentOS, Debian, Clear Linux, and Fedora.
This is the first of several upcoming 10GbE test comparisons. For those article we are testing some of the popular enterprise Linux distributions while follow-up articles will also be looking at some other distros as well as Windows Server and FreeBSD/DragonFlyBSD. CentOS 7, Debian 9.6, Clear Linux rolling, and Fedora Server 29 were the operating systems tested for this initial round.
The first server tested was the Dell PowerEdge R7425 with dual AMD EPYC 7601 processors, 512GB of DDR4 system memory, and Samsung 860 500GB SSD. The PowerEdge R7425 server features dual 10GbE RJ45 Ethernet ports using a Broadcom BCM57417 NetXTreme-E 10GBase-T dual-port controller. For this testing a CAT7 cable was connecting the server to the 10GbE switch.
The second server tested was the Tyan S7106 1U server with two Xeon Gold 6138 processors, 96GB of DDR4 memory, Samsung 970 EVO SSD, and for the 10GbE connectivity a PCIe card with QLogic cLOM8214 controller was used while connected via a 10G SPF+ DAC cable. This testing isn't meant for comparing the performance between these distinctly different servers but rather for looking at the 10GbE performance across the multiple Linux distributions.
All four distributions were cleanly installed on each system and tested in their stock configuration with the default kernels and all stable release updates applied.
The system running all of the server processes for the networking benchmarks was an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2920X system with Gigabyte X399 AORUS Gaming 7 motherboard, 16GB of RAM, 240GB Corsair Force MP510 NVMe SSD, and using a 10GbE PCIe network card with QLogic cLOM8214 controller. That system was running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.