Five-Way Linux OS Comparison On Amazon's ARM Graviton CPU

Fedora 29 was the fastest for PostgreSQL reads and writes while RHEL 7.6 was the slowest on this 16-core Graviton CPU configuration.

RHEL 7.6 was the notable outlier in the Redis benchmarks.

Ubuntu and Fedora were offering the fastest PHP performance.

If you are using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud to scale our your workloads based upon demand, Amazon Linux 2 was noticeably faster than the four other Linux distributions in its ARM boot time.

Of all the benchmarks run, Amazon Linux 2 was the fastest 34% of the time, which doesn't come as too surprising with the software and hardware both spun by Amazon Web Services and thus likely the most optimized Linux distribution at this point for these new A72-based ARM servers. Tied for second place was Fedora 29 and RHEL 7.6 with both having first place finishes 21% of the time, but when Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 wasn't the fastest it was often the slowest: RHEL 7.6 led by far in the most last place finishes at 37% of the time coming in dead last. Ubuntu 18.10 had wins about 13% of the time and then Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS just about 10% of the time.