One Month Of Monitoring The Linux Kernel Performance

For those that may have forgot, at the start of December we launched the Phoronix Kernel Test Farm to begin benchmarking the Linux kernel on a daily basis using the automated tools that we provide via the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic. Towards the middle of December we then unveiled the Phoromatic Tracker, which exposes these test results in real-time to the public. Well, it's now been a month of monitoring the kernel's performance and the entire Linux 2.6.33 kernel development cycle thus far, with many interesting findings.

Again, to view these test results go to kernel-tracker.phoromatic.com. We also launched a Fedora Rawhide Tracker in late December, however, those results are not up-to-date. On one of the days a Fedora Rawhide update had broke the system, which cannot be fixed until I return later on in January.

The Linux kernel benchmarks for the past month illustrate many different performance regressions, some of which are bad but others are actually improvements introduced into the Linux 2.6.33 kernel. With the EXT4 file-system in the Linux 2.6.33 kernel it represents yet more performance drops, as can be seen from the SQLite numbers, for example.

With the LZMA compression performance, however, the results have consistently improved with the latest kernel code.

There are over 50 benchmarks being run each day on the Linux kernel using our open-source, automated testing software. With the FLAC audio encoding and some of the other encoding tests the performance has been much better since the middle of December.

NASA's NAS Parallel Benchmarks have also shown off some improvements through the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic.

View all of the results via the Phoromatic Kernel Tracker.