Initial Benchmarks Of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 On An Intel Xeon Cascade Lake Server

The PyBench Python 3 performance was the slowest of the Linux distributions tested with Ubuntu and Clear Linux being much faster than openSUSE and Fedora/RHEL8.

While newer PHP software packages have been available through Red Hat Software Collections, the default RHEL7 PHP was based back on PHP5. As such, with RHEL 8.0 the out-of-the-box PHP performance on PHP7 is finally comparable to other newer Linux distributions. Intel's Clear Linux meanwhile shows what is possible when extensively tuning the offered software package.

When looking at the geometric mean for a few dozen benchmarks ran as part of the initial Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 benchmarking over the past 24 hours, RHEL 8.0 is indeed offering much nicer performance than CentOS / RHEL 7. Comparing RHEL 8.0 to CentOS 7.6 on this particular Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 Gigabyte Server, it is 24.6% faster. The RHEL 8.0 performance in these benchmarks came out just ahead of recent Fedora Server releases while coming in slightly faster was Ubuntu 19.04, openSUSE Leap 15.0, and of course Clear Linux.

Keep in mind these initial benchmarks are just off a single Intel Xeon server while follow-up tests being worked on now are looking at the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 performance on multiple servers as well as a slightly different mix of Linux distributions under test. Given the significant software differences between RHEL7 and RHEL8, we'd expect the performance boosts to be nearly across the board but particularly for newer systems.