5-Way Amazon EC2 Cloud Linux OS Benchmarks

With PostMark as a straightforward disk test, Amazon and the Ubuntu releases were performing all close to each other. The slowest performer in this disk test was SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, which is using EXT3 in the cloud. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 was using EXT4 but slower than Amazon/Ubuntu likely due to its use of the older Linux 2.6.32 kernel (with back-ports) over the newer Linux 3.x kernels in Amazon Linux and Ubuntu 12.04/13.10.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 was trailing Amazon Linux and Ubuntu in the Dolfyn fluid dynamics workload while SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 had failed to properly build this test.

The PolyBench-C tests saw little variation among these tests in the cloud.