The Ubuntu Linux Performance Over The Past Six Years On An Intel Xeon Server

The system/CPU tests are much more mixed with a range of wins and losses on Ubuntu 18.10 given the state of the GCC compiler and other library changes over the past six years.

Code compilation performance is slower with GCC 8 over GCC 4.8 due to all of the additional optimization passes and improvements made to the GNU Compiler Collection in the past half-decade for trying to deliver faster performance of the resulting binaries. Spectre/Meltdown mitigations also have a small impact on the compile speed of large applications spread across many files.

The C-Ray ray-tracing performance is faster thanks to GCC improvements we've tested individually in the past several years/releases.

The time to compress the Linux source tree into a .tar.gz hasn't budged at all.

LAME MP3 encoding meanwhile improved slightly on Ubuntu 18.10.