Running Ubuntu 9.04 With Older Hardware

When increasing the write size to 1GB with IOzone, Ubuntu 9.04 remained in front. Here the write speeds for Ubuntu 9.04 and 8.10 were 16.33MB/s and 14.57MB/s, respectively.

With the SQLite test the faster release was Ubuntu 9.04, but the results were too close to being significant. Of course, there is a major regression involving SQLite in the recent Linux kernels and was fixed in the Linux 2.6.29 kernel, so with Ubuntu 9.10 there should be a significant speed-up here. More information on that issue can be found in Benchmarking The Linux 2.6.24 Through 2.6.29 Kernels.

The OpenSSL RSA 4096-bit performance was the same between Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04.

Ubuntu 8.10 was faster than Ubuntu 9.04 with 2GB file encryption, but this older release only had a slight lead.

Ubuntu 9.04 had booted significantly faster than Ubuntu 8.10, but when it came to the desktop performance with this VIA Nehemiah system with 512MB of system memory, the performance was close between the two most recent Ubuntu releases. In several tests Ubuntu 8.10 was faster than Ubuntu 9.04, but the leads were very small and would likely go unnoticed by the desktop user. At least though the Ubuntu 9.04 desktop remains usable when using this antiquated hardware. The only tests where there was a noticeable difference was when testing the disk with IOzone, where Ubuntu 9.04 had delivered better read and write performance.