10GbE Linux Networking Performance Between CentOS, Fedora, Clear Linux & Debian

Ethr is a network benchmark developed by Microsoft and written in Golang. Ethr runs fine on Linux systems and provides a wide variety of network tests. Under this latency benchmark with 64 threads, the first server (Dell PowerEdge) saw the lowest latency on Debian 9.6 while on the second server (Tyan dual Xeon), the lowest latency was on Clear Linux followed by Debian while CentOS and Fedora were much further behind.

When using Ethr to see how many TCP connections per second across eight threads could be carried out, Debian 9.6 was the fastest on both systems followed by Clear Linux.

Debian continued to perform well even when increasing the number of processes, albeit with much higher variance in between runs.

The iperf benchmarks were largely uninteresting except for illustrating an area where Clear Linux was tending to fall behind the three other common Linux distributions.

Nuttcp was recently added to the Phoronix Test Suite and here it shows another case of where Clear Linux is abnormally slower than the rest, presumably due to its current kernel configuration.

With Netperf is where Clear Linux was performing well, at least on the Tyan server with QLogic cLOM8214. Additional network benchmarks are available via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.

That's my initial data from the past few days of benchmarking. A number of additional 10GbE Linux/BSD/Windows network benchmarks will be coming in soon on Phoronix.