A Few Worrisome Regressions Appear In Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10 Performance

Written by Michael Larabel in Ubuntu on 10 October 2015 at 01:32 PM EDT. 58 Comments
UBUNTU
With Ubuntu 15.10 set to be released later this month, I've started preparing for a variety of Linux performance comparisons involving the Wily Werewolf. This morning I ran some Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10 benchmarks on one of my frequent test beds and it's revealed a few significant changes in some of the benchmarks.

From the Intel Xeon E5-2687W v3 Haswell system with AMD FirePro V7900 (Cayman) graphics, I ran some Ubuntu 15.04 x86_64 vs. Ubuntu 15.10 x86_64 (the latest daily ISO) benchmarks on it. For the most part, the performance was close to the same as would largely be expected given just a six-month time span and the hardware having been already well supported by Linux for a while. Both installs were done cleanly and testing the out-of-the-box configuration.
Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10

However, in some of the benchmarks there is some rather significant performance changes:
Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10
Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10
Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10
Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10
Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10
Some of the scientific OpenMP workloads are much slower now with Ubuntu 15.10... Perhaps due to the GCC 5 upgrade? However, on other systems/distributions I don't recall ever running into such a regression for these tests on the latest GNU Compiler Collection.
Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10
Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10
Compile times are slower.
Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10
Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10
Some other tests are also clearly slower.

I'm still investigating these issues and running Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10 performance benchmarks on other systems, but just sharing these preliminary results to make this weekend performance investigation worthwhile and seeing if any Phoronix readers have encountered similar slowdowns if moving to Ubuntu Wily. All of the initial performance results in full for this system on Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10 can be found via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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