Linux 4.0 To Linux 4.15 Kernel Benchmarks

The NGINX web-server performance did see a drop with Linux 4.15 in our many benchmarks over the past few weeks. But at least when comparing it to older kernel releases, it's not at the lowest level we've seen.

Similarly, Apache web server performance is also lower and sadly isn't isolated to Linux 4.15 but as you can see from these benchmarks has been gradually getting slower over the course of kernel upgrades.

PHPbench and other workloads without much direct kernel interaction are largely flat across the tested releases.

Hackbench is at its slowest performance across the tested kernels on this Core i7 5960X box.

Overall there are indeed some slowdowns when using the Linux 4.15 kernel. But, at least in several of the real-world benchmarks, the performance out of Linux 4.15 is fortunately not at the lowest levels we've seen with benchmarking these kernel releases of the past three years. With Linux 4.16 just around the corner though hopefully we will be seeing more performance improvements -- stay tuned for more benchmarks as always on Phoronix. At the moment I am also working on an even larger Linux kernel performance comparison and should have those results available in the next week.