Arch Linux vs. Antergos vs. Clear Linux vs. Ubuntu Benchmarks

With the Python Tensorflow test, Arch Linux is slightly quicker than Antergos while Clear Linux has a greater lead than that difference.

It's also a similar story with PostgreSQL.

The Redis results ranged from Arch Linux performing about the same as the default Antergos Minimal install to being slightly faster and roughly around the same performance as Ubuntu. Clear though had generally come out ahead, even considering Redis sees a performance drop from the Retpoline kernel patches that are currently enabled just on Clear Linux of the tested distributions.

PHPBench with Arch was noticeably faster than Ubuntu Server and Antergos but came in right behind Clear Linux.

Well it was interesting doing this round of testing considering all the Phoronix readers that were salivating for such tests since last week's Ubuntu tweaking article. In many of the cases, the Arch Linux install with some basic optimizations did allow it to perform measurably better than a out-of-the-box Antergos Minimal installation. But in some tests, Antergos remained in-line with these bare Arch results as did Ubuntu 17.10 while not requiring any lengthy build/install process, etc. Clear Linux though did remain ahead in nearly all of the tests over Arch due to its much more aggressive tuning, building OS packages with function multi-versioning, auto feedback-directed optimizations, backporting various performance-related patches, etc.

I'm working on some other tuning-typed articles and hope to have more interesting data to share soon, especially with more interested now in tweaking/optimizing Linux for better performance to offset the overhead of KPTI and Retpoline protection.