Amazon Linux 2 Benchmarks, 6-Way Linux OS EC2 Compute Cloud Comparison

And with C-Ray multi-threaded ray-tracing, Amazon Linux 2 slowed down to finish in last place while Clear Linux was the front-runner.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 followed by Amazon Linux 2 were the front-runners with the Stockfish chess engine benchmark, albeit by slim margins.

Lastly, a look at the systemd boot speeds of these different AMIs on the EC2 cloud of the m4.4xlarge instance type:

As we have seen from our previous rounds of tests, Clear Linux by far has been the quickest operating system we've seen when it comes to boot speeds on Amazon EC2. This metric can be important for some if looking to quickly deploy instances on-demand when needed for scaling to your workload's needs. Clear Linux was up in less than one second while Amazon Linux 2 was the next fastest at 9 seconds and then Ubuntu 16.04 LTS at 11 seconds. Amazon Linux AMI 2017.09 results are not available as it does not use systemd.

Overall, Amazon Linux 2 was faster in a number of the benchmarks we ran today from the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). However, in some instances the performance had actually regressed. Intel's Clear Linux generally remains the fastest distribution we have found in EC2 thus far and for our benchmarks. Of the tests ran today, Clear Linux had 17 wins while Ubuntu 16.04 LTS had the second most wins at five followed by Amazon Linux 2 in third with just three wins. Amazon Linux AMI 2017.09, SUSE Linux Enterprise 12, and Amazon Linux 2 all tied at seven for the most losses.