Gentoo vs. Ubuntu performance comparison

LinuxMag has made a performance comparison of Gentoo at various gcc optimization levels against the previous release of Ubuntu (9.04).

http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7574/1/

The X11 and 3D performance comparison is not meaningful, as they compare different versions of the NVidia proprietary driver. But other benchmarks are quite interesting.

Their conclusion:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7574/3/

Although we are not comparing apples to apples, Gentoo did out-perform Ubuntu in almost every test, and sometimes by a fair margin. It does appear that optimizing for a specific CPU can yield a decent performance increase.

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Of course the decision for or against Gentoo is not primarily due to performance, as the commenters point out.

Gentoo faster than Ubuntu? What else is new ;)

Nice results, good to see some flags have meaningful impact on performance.

Different versions of Kernel, X server, Nvidia driver and completely different DEs. What conclusions can possibly be drawn from such a "comparison"?

With a little work the Gentoo system could have had the same versions of everything.

@krazy: actually they did match DEs - both Xfce4, but your point still stands.

I wanna see Archlinux thrown into the mix as well.

What's not faster than Ubuntu? Possibly Slowaris, but I can't think of anything else.

@krazy: Phoronix already tested the performance of different kernels. Some tasks are faster and some slower, but the assumption that kernel version skewed the results is not consistent with the almost sweeping win of the 2.6.30 based system over 2.6.28.

Different X server and NVidia driver affect X11 and 3D performance (that is why I said that this part of the comparison is meaningless), but not media encoding, database or similar tasks.

Both systems had the same gcc version and the same filesystem, so I would guess that the compute and I/O results are mostly valid.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by nightmorph

What's not faster than Ubuntu? Possibly Slowaris, but I can't think of anything else.

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slowlaris, bsd and probably Fedora, because it has some 'heavy' things enabled.

a comparison of "time to install" would be fun :)