Running Ubuntu 9.10 With Older PC Hardware
When looking at the 2GB write performance with the IOzone test profile, Ubuntu 9.10 offered the best performance. Ubuntu 9.10 was 24% faster than earlier Ubuntu releases with the disk writes, largely due to the file-system switch to EXT4.
While Ubuntu 9.10 offered the best write performance, its read performance had suffered. Ubuntu 9.10 with a 2GB read had an average speed of 32MB/s while Ubuntu 8.04.3 had a speed of 43MB/s. In between Ubuntu 8.04 and 9.10 were 8.10 and 9.04, which had read at 65MB/s and 60MB/s, respectively. Between Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10 this was nearly a 50% drop in performance for this mobile IDE hard drive.
The Karmic Koala returned to its top position with the PostMark test profile. Ubuntu 9.10 had scored 151 transactions per second while the three earlier Canonical operating system releases were all below 95 TPS. Ubuntu 9.04 had just 77 TPS, which is nearly a 100% improvement in performance for the EXT4-bearing Karmic.