Ubuntu 12.04 LTS vs. 14.04 LTS Cloud Benchmarks

With some basic disk benchmarking, the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS instance was noticeably faster than the brand new Ubuntu 14.04 version. It's tough to know what exactly is going on here since both Ubuntu LTS versions were running EXT4 and based upon our bare metal tests of the two Ubuntu LTS versions there wasn't a huge performance impact nor were there many EXT4 file-system changes between the used kernel versions. It may just come down to the variable hardware and performance in using the public cloud; further tests of DigitalOcean's different instances between the Ubuntu LTS releases along with Amazon EC2 are presently being conducted.

The heavy Parboil benchmark ranged in its results from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS being faster to losing to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

The Rodinia results also swayed with the various sub-tests but overall the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS performance was appearing to be faster.