Seven Years Of Ubuntu Performance - Benchmarking Ubuntu 13.04 Through Ubuntu 20.04 Development Builds

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Seven Years Of Ubuntu Performance - Benchmarking Ubuntu 13.04 Through Ubuntu 20.04 Development Builds

The latest in our series of interesting year-end benchmarks -- made more interesting by also looking at the Linux performance over the 2010s -- is looking at the performance of Ubuntu Linux over the past roughly seven years by re-testing all the releases. Ubuntu 19.10 stable and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development builds were tested along with the Ubuntu releases going back to Ubuntu 13.04, the initial release where the Intel Sandy Bridge support was in good shape for the Core i7 2700K platform being used for this round of benchmarking. It's quite a wild ride looking at the Ubuntu performance over this long span with dozens of different workloads.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=28698

[stormcrow]

These tests seem to point out the problems in 19.10 with numbers that I was only getting a general impression about while just trying it out on a couple of spare systems. 19.10 just "feels" slow and not as responsive to me. It's not just the problems with all the hardware mitigations, and it's not just Gnome. Even Xubuntu and Kubuntu have the general feeling of trying to swim through molasses in January to me. 19.10 doesn't feel as snappy or responsive compared to even 18.04.x on the same hardware. I certainly hope Canonical irons that out before 20.04 is released.

[perpetually high]

These tests seem to point out the problems in 19.10 with numbers that I was only getting a general impression about while just trying it out on a couple of spare systems. 19.10 just "feels" slow and not as responsive to me. It's not just the problems with all the hardware mitigations, and it's not just Gnome. Even Xubuntu and Kubuntu have the general feeling of trying to swim through molasses in January to me. 19.10 doesn't feel as snappy or responsive compared to even 18.04.x on the same hardware. I certainly hope Canonical irons that out before 20.04 is released.

This is a you problem, with all due respect. Feel free to post your ./phoronix-test-suite system-info and we can see what could be the culprit, but it's not a Gnome/Ubuntu/kernel/etc problem.

[aronwolf]

The benchmark demonstrates that it is very difficult to get more performance than we already have. This makes a lot of sense because the Linux kernel is very optimized for the CPU usage, what It makes it ideal for servers. The only way to get really more performance would be to not support older hardware and adapt the compile flags.

On the desktop, the performance problems come from other parts, like bottlenecks and a single thread architecture (on GNOME). Also, Graphic cards can still improve. But anyway, we have much better graphics drivers than some years ago and GNOME also has improved a lot

[kodi]

Mitigations for Spectre and other security vulnerabilities were added to the Linux kernel in early 2018. Were these mitigations perhaps enabled in Ubuntu 2018.04 and later and absent from Ubuntu 17.10? Could that explain the Ubuntu 2018.04 performance drop?

[tildearrow]

Typo:

The ctx-clock program shows the context switching speed how on Ubunu in 2017

For some of these browser tests their performance is impaired from the security mitigatiosn over the past almost three years.

[ermo]

Mitigations for Spectre and other security vulnerabilities were added to the Linux kernel in early 2018. Were these mitigations perhaps enabled in Ubuntu 2018.04 and later and absent from Ubuntu 17.10? Could that explain the Ubuntu 2018.04 performance drop?

Judging specifically by the sharp rise in context switch time (as shown by the ctx_clock and StressNG benchmarks) from 17.10 to 18.04, that indeed appears to be the case.

[milkylainen]

It would be interesting to know what a modern kernel actually can do if not hindered by the mandatory abmysal product handling...

[arQon]

milkylainen - you should know about -mitigations=off by now: Michael's mentioned it a few times in the past. (Or did you mean you'd like him to test that? Which I agree would be interesting to see).

Intel, the gift that keeps on giving.
It's funny, but it used to be "Andy giveth, and Bill taketh away", with Intel's CPUs *doubling* in performance every few years, and shitty software (developers) managing to piss away ALL of that performance and more thanks to garbage frameworks and a total lack of ability. Now it's Intel burning the performance, and developers trying to micro-optimise code to get that back to where it was 3 years ago...