Seven Years Of Ubuntu Performance - Benchmarking Ubuntu 13.04 Through Ubuntu 20.04 Development Builds

The kernel boot time hasn't changed too vastly going back to Ubuntu 15.04. Older releases couldn't be tested due to relying upon systemd's timer metrics.

When looking at the data from 76 benchmarks, the fastest distribution was Ubuntu 16.04 with 12 wins followed by Ubuntu 18.10 and Ubuntu 17.04 being tied in second place with 11 wins each. Meanwhile, Ubuntu 19.10 only had three sound first place finishes and Ubuntu 20.04 in its current development form had six wins.

Meanwhile for last place finishes, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS came in last place eight times and Ubuntu 19.10 was in last place six times.

When taking the geometric mean of the tests **that were able to successfully run across all the tested Ubuntu releases** going back to Ubuntu 13.04, here is how that positioning looks. The best performance was on Ubuntu 17.04 but by the time of Ubuntu 18.04 with the mitigations hitting, the geometric mean was lowered and since then has only bounced around slightly. But in going by the geometric mean, at least moving from Ubuntu 13.04 to 20.04 LTS daily does show a 12% improvement to the performance.

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