Early Linux 2.6.31 Kernel Benchmarks
With the Parallel BZIP2 Compression test profile there was a noticeable jump in performance between the Linux 2.6.29 and 2.6.30 kernels with this Intel Core 2 Duo system, and this improved multi-threaded PBZIP2 performance remained with Linux 2.6.31-rc2.
When it came to the static web-page serving performance with Apache, its performance was virtually dead even between Linux 2.6.29 and 2.6.31-rc2, at least with the hardware we had been using in this round of tests.
The ray-tracing performance with Bwfirt was also nearly identical between the tested kernels.