Ubuntu 16.04 vs. 18.04 Performance On Six Systems

The code compilation performance is slower with Ubuntu 18.04 due to the move from GCC5 to GCC7. The additional optimizations added to the GCC compiler over the years does tend to slow down the compiler's speed, albeit with usually faster run-time performance for generated programs.

The LAME MP3 encoding performance was faster on Ubuntu 18.04 with the i9-790XE and dual Xeon Gold systems.

The Hackbench Linux kernel scheduler synthetic benchmark was performing much better overall with Ubuntu 18.04's Linux 4.15-based kernel.

The socket activity benchmark via Stress-NG is slower with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, likely due to the continued Spectre/Meltdown changes in the more recent kernels.

While the message passing was faster on the AMD systems with Ubuntu 18.04.