Seven Years Of Ubuntu Performance - Benchmarking Ubuntu 13.04 Through Ubuntu 20.04 Development Builds
The time it takes to compile the same version of PHP has been increasing with time due to the newer Ubuntu releases having newer GCC releases and that generally meaning longer compile times as they introduce new features and optimization passes.
Meanwhile C-Ray and Smallpt are among the prime examples for showing that the newer GCC releases can often help the performance of the resulting binary.
XZ compression performance has been taking longer since Ubuntu 18.04 and put the results back to the 2013 performance levels.