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Artigo completoUbuntu 7.04 to 8.10 Benchmarks: Is Ubuntu Getting Slower?
With the release of Ubuntu 8.10 coming out later this week we decided to use this opportunity to explore how the performance of this desktop Linux operating system has evolved over the past few releases. We performed clean installations of Ubuntu 7.04, Ubuntu 7.10, Ubuntu 8.04, and Ubuntu 8.10 on a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 notebook and used the Phoronix Test Suite to run 35 tests on each release that covered nine different areas of the system. After spending well more than 100 hours running these tests, the results are now available and our findings may very well surprise you.
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Results
OpenGL / Gaming: With one exception, the performance of OpenArena, World of Padman, and Unreal Tournament 2004 was similar between Ubuntu 7.04 "Feisty Fawn" and Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex". For these tests it's important to keep in mind that the closed-source ATI Catalyst driver was used since it wasn't until earlier this year that there was open-source 3D acceleration in the Mesa stack for the ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 (R500 series). Had we been able to use the Mesa and X.Org drivers with each Ubuntu release, we would have likely noticed improved performance over time considering the work that has gone on within these areas. Alternatively, there would have also been improvements to speak of had we used the ATI Catalyst drivers that were released around the same time of each distribution release. What is important to note is that the gaming performance hadn't dropped with the newer releases.
Desktop / GTK: When using GtkPerf to measure the performance of the GtkDrawingArea widget with Pixbufs, the performance was more or less identical with Ubuntu 7.04, 7.10, and 8.04. When switching to Ubuntu 8.10, however, the performance had dropped by more than 20%. This could be attributed to the binary-only ATI driver with X Server 1.5 / X.Org 7.4. The performance of 5,000 iterations of the GtkRadioButton widget in Ubuntu 8.10 was slower than Ubuntu 7.04, which could be caused by GTK changes or the ATI driver.
Memory: Our main system memory benchmark is RAMspeed and here the integer and floating-point memory performance was similar between the Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, Hardy Heron, and Intrepid Ibex releases, but was marginally slower than Ubuntu 7.04. In no RAMspeed test did the Gutsy Gibbon, Hardy Heron, or Intrepid Ibex releases out perform the Feisty Fawn. In the Bandwidth benchmark, we had experienced a similar situation with 7.10, 8.04, and 8.10 running slower than 7.04, but by a much greater margin. Here these three newer releases were almost 50% slower.
Audio/Video Encoding: In all of the audio encoding tests (MP3, Ogg, FLAC, and WavPack), Ubuntu 7.10 was the fastest at converting the WAV audio file to the different formats. Other common traits to the audio encoding tests were that Ubuntu 7.04 was the second fastest, but both Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 were by far the slowest at audio encoding. In all four of the audio tests, Ubuntu Hardy and Intrepid were nearly 50% slower or greater. As all of these audio tests are built from source, this slowdown may be attributed to a difference in default optimizations or Intel regressions within GCC 4.2/4.3. When it came to video encoding with FFmpeg to convert our sample AVI file to an NTSC VCD, the 7.10, 8.04, and 8.10 releases were also much slower than the GCC 4.1-based Ubuntu 7.04.
Computational: The Dhrystone 2 performance within the BYTE Unix Benchmark was also the fastest on Ubuntu 7.04. There was approximately a 20% drop in performance between 7.04 and 7.10 that remained consistent even in the 8.04 and 8.10 releases. Further showing signs of a significant performance regression between Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10 was the SciMark 2.0 performance. The composite result from SciMark 2.0 had dropped by nearly 30% between Feisty and Gutsy and it too has yet to be recovered. In our eSpeak Speech Engine benchmark, which measures the time to run a text-to-speech engine converting some text to a WAV file, was a 50% performance drop after Ubuntu 7.04 and it continued with 8.04 and 8.10.
Database: In our SQLite test of measuring the time to perform 2,500 SQL inserts, the performance hadn't dropped off after Ubuntu 7.04 but instead after 8.04 LTS. In this performance drop it was over 2.5x slower. Further reiterating signs of a major performance drop following Ubuntu 7.04 was our Tandem XML benchmark where there were similar losses in performance.
Compilation: This may sound like a broken record now, but in our compilation benchmarks we spotted major performance losses following the Feisty Fawn release. It was noticeably slower to compile Apache, PHP, and ImageMagick in the 7.10, 8.04, and 8.10 releases. This certainly reiterates signs of a major performance problem introduced after Ubuntu 7.04 (perhaps with GCC or the kernel) at least with the Intel hardware used by the ThinkPad T60 in our testing.
Encryption: In many of these benchmarks the performance had dropped off after Ubuntu 7.04, but when it came to encrypting a 2GB file with GnuPG there was enhanced performance starting with 7.10 and it continued into 8.04 and 8.10. The OpenSSL RSA 4096-bit performance was flat-lined across all distributions tested. In the Java-powered Bork File Encrypter, the performance had too slowed down.Disk: Not impacted by any regression after Ubuntu 7.04 was the Bonnie++ benchmark, which tests the system's hard disk drive. The operations per second was relatively the same in the sequential create process while when performing random reads there was a drop off after 7.04 but it returned to surge ahead in 8.04 and 8.10. The Bonnie++ random read performance in Ubuntu 8.10 ended up being slightly ahead of Ubuntu 7.04. The random delete speed was also improved following Ubuntu 7.04. These disk performance improvements are likely attributed to the libata improvements in the recent Linux kernel releases.
Java: In the Java SciMark computational tests, the performance was slower in the Ubuntu 8.xx releases. This may be explained by IcedTea, but that shouldn't be since it's derived from OpenJDK and Sun's official Java source-code.
Major slowdowns after Ubuntu 7.04 "Feisty Fawn" in so many different tests certainly weren't what we had expected. This is our first time carrying out an Ubuntu comparison of recent releases on a large scale using a significant number of tests. It's likely the first time such a study has even been conducted. The tests that experienced performance losses initially we assumed were due to a regression with GCC but the tests extended beyond the ones built from source to include Java ones that use compiled byte-code and even the PHP-driven XML test.
A number of significant kernel changes had gone on between these Ubuntu Linux releases including the Completely Fair Scheduler, the SLUB allocator, tickless kernel support, etc. We had also repeated many of these tests to confirm we were not experiencing a performance fluke or other issue (even though the Phoronix Test Suite carries out each test in a completely automated and repeatable fashion) but nothing had changed. Ubuntu 7.04 was certainly the Feisty Fawn for performance, but based upon these results perhaps it would be better to call Ubuntu 7.10 the Gooey Gibbon, 8.04 the Hungover Heron, and 8.10 the Idling Ibex.
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