Glibc 2.29 Is Offering Up Some Nice Performance Improvements

Glibc 2.29 was released a few days back and like most GNU C Library releases -- particularly in recent times -- does offer up more CPU performance optimizations... Some early benchmarks done this weekend do show some nice performance improvements in select workloads at least out of our initial benchmarking.

Glibc 2.29 was just released this past Thursday while over the weekend Intel's rolling-release Clear Linux distribution already moved from Glibc 2.28 to this newest stable release. Given the short time since they pushed out the update, I have only done tests on one system so far but the numbers are looking good. Tests were done on Clear Linux 27590 with Glibc 2.28 and then Clear Linux 27600 that switches over to the new Glibc 2.29.0.

This weekend benchmarking was done with the speedy Intel Core i9 7980XE system while tests on some other hardware will be coming in shortly. Take these as just some initial Glibc 2.29 performance figures. While many users are often eager for better performance, unfortunately, most non-rolling-release distributions do take a while until the new GNU C Library releases appear (namely, the next release cycle), but for those on the likes of Clear Linux, Arch, and Gentoo, Glibc 2.29 does look to be a worthwhile improvement, besides its getcpu() wrapper and other non-performance additions and security fixes.