Running Ubuntu 9.10 With Older PC Hardware

The LAT operation in Ubuntu 9.10 was tied with 8.04.3 for the best performance with this GraphicsMagick test.

At simple image resizing, Ubuntu 9.10 had the best performance.

Lastly, we have results from the timed MAFFT alignment, where Ubuntu 9.10 had performed the best by a very small margin.

Ubuntu 9.10 offers a number of new features to Linux desktop and server users along with other core improvements to this incredibly popular Linux distribution. In a number of our tests today with an older ThinkPad notebook, Ubuntu 9.10 also provided the best performance when compared to earlier Ubuntu releases from the past 18 months. However, in six of the eighteen tests that were run, there were notable performance regressions involving Ubuntu 9.10. Many performance improvements can be attributed to the switch from the EXT3 to EXT4 file-system by default, but in the tests that did not benefit from this newer file-system, it ended up degrading the performance. The ioquake3 performance with the open-source ATI R300 driver is another troubling area with Ubuntu 9.10. Fortunately though when using newer hardware we have not encountered as many performance drops, and even still, most users will find Ubuntu 9.10 worth the upgrade.