Benchmarking Various Linux Distributions With Amazon's EC2 Cloud In 2017

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 29 April 2017 at 12:00 PM EDT. Page 1 of 3. 5 Comments.

After carrying out the recent Amazon EC2 Cloud benchmarks vs. Intel/AMD CPUs I also decided to run some Linux distribution tests in the Elastic Compute Cloud with not having done any such comparisons in a long time. So for those wondering how different Linux distributions compare in Amazon's cloud, this article is for you.

The distributions tested for this Amazon EC2 comparison were Amazon Linux AMI 2017.03, CentOS 6.7, Debian Linux 8.7, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2, and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Each Linux distribution was tested out-of-the-box with its default EC2 image.

The instance type used for benchmarking was the c4.4xlarge that offers 16 vCPU, 30GiB of memory, and EBS storage. For all of the c4.4xlarge instances created, they were backed by Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3 Haswell CPUs.

All of the Linux distribution benchmarks on EC2 were carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.


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