6-Way Enterprise Focused Linux Distribution Comparison With An Intel Core i9, Dual Xeon Gold Systems

With the Perl benchmarks the tests themselves are quite quick and thus you won't find much of a real-world impact unless running a lot of heavy Perl scripts. But with that said, Intel's Clear Linux was by far the quickest on both systems while openSUSE Tumbleweed and Ubuntu 18.04 daily were the slowest.

When using PyBench for some Python coverage, Intel's Clear Linux was again the fastest distribution benchmarked followed by Ubuntu 18.04 daily and in last was CentOS 7. If you haven't seen our cross-distribution comparisons previously or unfamiliar with Clear Linux, Intel spends a lot of effort optimizing Clear Linux in the name of performance and hence why it's always an interesting performance target. Clear Linux ships with aggressive CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS, a tuned kernel configuration that sometimes back-ports performance-related patches, building some packages with Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO), shipping libraries tuned for AVX/AVX-512 when detected on the host system, etc.

Using Numpy as another important benchmark for Python scientific users, Clear Linux maintained a slight lead over the newer distributions while CentOS 7 and openSUSE 42.3 were the slowest with their older but proven stock packages.

PHPBench wasn't running on all of the operating systems tested, but did at least on Ubuntu, Clear, and CentOS. CentOS 7 / EL7 is much slower than the rest due to it still relying on PHP5 as its default PHP packages (though PHP 7 can be obtained from other repositories) while the other distributions are using PHP7. Clear Linux comes out in the lead on both systems, to not much surprise, and months ago covered their efforts at optimizing PHP with PGO, etc.