Intel Linux Kernel Optimizations Show Huge Benefit For High Core Count Servers

With the MariaDB MySQL server there is a very clear difference in behavior between Clear Linux's optimizations and stock Ubuntu 23.04 when running at 15+ threads. As with all these benchmarks, the same benchmark/software configuration was used across testing and we see Clear Linux coping much better at 30+ threads than with Ubuntu. Intel's optimizations around kernel locking contention and other tuning is paying off big time for the out-of-the-box Linux performance.

The poor database performance at high thread counts outside of Intel's tuned environment was less of an issue for PostgreSQL but did still show much greater performance on Clear Linux than Ubuntu at 120+ threads.

I certainly hope that Intel will soon be able to get most of their optimization work upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel for the benefit of all distributions.