Ubuntu 12.04 LTS vs. 14.04 LTS Cloud Benchmarks

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS vs. 14.04 LTS Cloud Benchmarks

Our latest Ubuntu 14.04 LTS benchmarks up this morning to complement our preliminary Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server benchmarks and desktop benchmarks are of the past two Ubuntu Long Term Support releases running within DigitalOcean's public cloud.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=20224

[chrisb]

It may just come down to the variable hardware and performance in using the public cloud;

This is why we use statistics; to determine whether such observed variability is significant. The reported standard error here indicates that the values probably really are different. However, you may be seeing serial correlation if all of the runs for a particular Ubuntu version are carried out at once, followed by all the runs for the other version. You could avoid that by interleaving the tests on each version, ideally by choosing a random order.

[cynical]

I'm not sure what you are testing here. Couldn't you eliminate the variability by using a local machine? Am I missing some huge difference between that and "cloud" computing?