Seven Years Of Ubuntu Performance - Benchmarking Ubuntu 13.04 Through Ubuntu 20.04 Development Builds

First up were some storage tests and beginning with SQLite considering this embedded database library is widely used by countless applications. In the case of the SQLite insertion test, the performance had improved since Ubuntu 13.04 but has been quite noisy between releases; the best result was found with Ubuntu 13.10 followed by Ubuntu 18.04.

Since Ubuntu 13.04 the performance has particularly improved a lot when it comes to running multiple SQLite databases concurrently, with this test doing eight tests in parallel. While Ubuntu has used EXT4 over the course of all the tested releases, there has been the obvious kernel improvements plus with time going from the deadline I/O scheduler to CFQ in Ubuntu 17.04 and then in Ubuntu 19.04 switching over to MQ-DEADLINE.

With SQLite's own built-in "speedtest", the performance has been hit hard since Ubuntu 18.04 and carried through in all the releases since. This is one of the cases where the performance has suffered from the likes of Spectre and Meltdown mitigations.

In FIO as well the I/O performance has been lower in the more recent Ubuntu releases, but in some cases not as bad as some of the past historical Ubuntu releases.

FS-Mark has been sliding since Ubuntu 18.04 to the point that the worst performance was on Ubuntu 19.10 for this i7-2700K Sandy Bridge + SATA 3.0 SSD system.