Fedora 31 Performance Is Still Sliding In The Wrong Direction - Benchmarks Against Ubuntu 19.10 + Clear Linux

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 31 October 2019 at 09:04 AM EDT. Page 1 of 6. 46 Comments.

The performance of Fedora 30 on multiple systems has generally been coming up short compared to the likes of Ubuntu, Clear Linux, and openSUSE Tumbleweed. With this week's release of Fedora 31 I was hopeful that the performance would be more competitive to other prominent Linux distributions, but sadly that doesn't appear to be the case. Here are some initial benchmarks of Fedora Workstation 31 compared to Fedora Workstation 30, Clear Linux 31450, and Ubuntu 19.10.

The performance of Fedora on recent releases has frankly not been too impressive. While Red Hat has been doing a lot to add more features to the Linux desktop and other new functionality throughout the stack, performance has seemingly not been a major focus for them in recent times. On many different AMD and Intel systems, the performance of Fedora has generally lagged behind the likes of Ubuntu, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Debian Buster. Of course, also behind Intel's Clear Linux that tends to be the gold standard for x86_64 Linux performance.

While Fedora 31 has lots of new/improved features, performance doesn't seem to be one of them. I'm still running Fedora 31 tests on more systems, but so far the performance across dozens of workloads is either on-par to Fedora Workstation 30 or regressed. Fedora 30 itself has seen some slowdowns with stable release updates as shown by these tests today having both stock Fedora 30 and then Fedora 30 with all of their liberal updates taking it to newer kernel versions, etc.

For this initial benchmarking of Fedora 31, tests were done on an Intel Core i9 7980XE with ASUS PRIME X299-A motherboard, 4 x 4GB DDR4 memory, Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSD, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN X graphics.

All of the Linux distributions were freshly installed on the same system and tested with their out-of-the-box settings. All of the benchmarks facilitated in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the Phoronix Test Suite.


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