The Performance Of Five Linux Distributions From Early 2016 To The End Of 2018

In the case of the CompileBench test during the simulating of the compile process, all of the 2018 Linux distributions were slower than at the start of 2016. But in the case of Intel's Clear Linux, it was faster then and remains much faster now than any of the four other distributions -- in fact, it's 2018 state is faster than any of the other distributions were in 2016. CompileBench is one of the workloads affected by Spectre/Meltdown mitigations.

For the more I/O heavy initial create process of Compile Bench, Clear Linux and Ubuntu were the only ones bucking the trend of CentOS / Fedora / openSUSE of running slower, but there was high variation on the Clear/Ubuntu runs making it less definitive to call, but regardless Clear Linux and Ubuntu were still the fastest in this particular test. The aging CentOS 7 was the slowest in this benchmark.

With the Himeno pressure solver workload, there wasn't much change in performance between the start of 2016 and end of 2018. The only runs to really point out were Ubuntu and openSUSE having slight performance advantages.

Under the C-Ray multi-threaded ray-tracer, all of the Linux distributions except for Clear Linux are slower now in 2018 while the Intel distribution was slightly faster and furthering its first place lead.