180+ Benchmarks On Debian GNU/Linux 9.6 Against Debian Buster Testing

There is the release of Debian 10 "Buster" to look forward to (hopefully) next year for succeeding Debian 9 "Stretch" that debuted back in 2017. Curious about the current performance of Debian Buster, I ran 183 benchmarks on Debian 9.6 stable against the current Debian Buster Testing images for seeing how the performance compares.

On an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX box with 32GB of RAM, Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSD and Radeon RX 580 graphics, I compared the current performance of Debian 9.6 to the latest Debian Testing images. Obviously when the Debian 10.0 release nears I will be testing it on a more diverse selection of hardware while for this benchmarking comparison was just using this Threadripper 2 + Radeon RX 580 Polaris system.

Debian Buster right now is using the Linux 4.18 kernel compared to Linux 4.9 still relied upon by Stretch. The Mesa state is a very big impact if you haven't upgraded from what's shipped by Stretch... It's going from Mesa 13.0 to Mesa 18.2 right now. The GCC compiler upgrade is a similarly big leap from GCC 6.3 to GCC 8.2. There are also other big package upgrades too like moving from Python 3.5 to currently Python 3.6.

Here's a look at the current Debian Buster performance with the 183 benchmarks being run via the open-source and fully-automated Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.