Clear Linux Container Performance Continues Showing Sizable Gains

For those interested in using Distrobox to augment your operating system's package selection, not all containers are created equally. Distrobox developer Luca Di Maio recently did some tests for looking at the Linux container performance.

Luca carried out some tests as he became curious about the performance benefits to Intel's Clear Linux if running confined to a container on a conventional Linux distribution. From a Fedora 35 host he compared the performance of using a Clear Linux container in that environment to then running a Fedora 35 container, the same as the host.

Among Luca's findings were "Clear Linux finishes first 90% of the times, the F35 container also is in the range of measurement error with the host, showing that running in Podman is not influential for these benchmarks... In almost all tests Clear Linux shows a mild to significant performance gain (5% up to 15%, except libavif test with 50%+), even without the kernel optimizations/patches that you'd have running a Clear Linux host."

Those interested can find Luca's testing within this forum thread. A few years back I ran similar benchmarks looking at the Docker performance across Linux distributions for those interested. Though it's perhaps a good time to run some fresh Linux container benchmarks.