Debian vs. Ubuntu vs. CentOS vs. openSUSE vs. Clear Linux Post-Meltdown Performance

With the Perl benchmarks there appears to be some deviation in the results with the patched kernels. Clear Linux overall remained the fastest while Ubuntu 17.10 and openSUSE tended to be the slowest.

The PostgreSQL performance on this system went unchanged, likely due to the Samsung 950 PRO NVMe SSD tending to perform abnormally slow for database workloads compared to other NVMe solid-state drives we frequently test here at Phoronix.

Clear Linux secured additional wins when running the Redis benchmark that is affected by the kernel overhead of the KPTI and Retpoline (on patched distributions). Relatively Debian/Ubuntu and Clear Linux tended to see less of an impact on Redis than openSUSE and CentOS on their older kernels.