Benchmarks With Early Fedora 13 Numbers

Benchmarks With Early Fedora 13 Numbers

Published on January 15, 2010
Written by Michael Larabel
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With Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 having made it out yesterday, we couldn't resist but to run some new benchmarks of the Lucid Lynx after our original tests last month found Ubuntu 10.04 was off to a poor performance start. In some areas the performance of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Alpha 2 remains lower than in Ubuntu 9.10 -- largely due to performance regressions upstream in the Linux kernel -- but we have also included some very early performance numbers from Fedora 13.

While Ubuntu's Lucid Lynx has already had two development releases, Red Hat has not yet put out any development releases for Fedora 13. The first and only alpha release of Fedora 13 is planned for the middle of February while a beta release will come at the start of April and then the final release will enter the world towards the middle of May, assuming there are no delays. With that said, Fedora 13 is still heavily in development and will certainly change a lot between now and then (especially with how closely they follow some packages and their upstream involvement), but we have included benchmark numbers from the 2010-01-13 nightly compose desktop image of Fedora Rawhide. Beyond being an early snapshot of Fedora 13, Red Hat enables numerous debugging options within their Rawhide kernel and other packages that are then disabled prior to the official release. These debugging options can impair the system's performance, but as with all Fedora and Ubuntu releases, we will be back with many more benchmarks throughout the development cycle. These Fedora 13 numbers should just be looked at for reference purposes.

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We used the 64-bit versions of Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 and Fedora 13 (2010-01-13), which were compared to the stable version of Ubuntu 9.10 (x86_64). Ubuntu 9.10 uses the Linux 2.6.31 kernel, GNOME 2.28.1, X Server 1.6.4, and GCC 4.4.1. Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 ups the package versions to the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, GNOME 2.29.4, X Server 1.7.4 RC2, and GCC 4.4.3. Our January 13 Rawhide snapshot contained the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, GNOME 2.29.4, X Server 1.7.3, and GCC 4.4.2. Both Ubuntu and Fedora use the EXT4 file-system by default and all three distributions were tested with their default settings and options. The NVIDIA 190.53 display driver was installed on Ubuntu and Fedora to provide 3D acceleration support for the NVIDIA Quadro graphics hardware that was used during testing.

The hardware used for testing was a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 notebook with an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 processor, 4GB of system memory, a 100GB Hitachi HTS72201 hard drive, and a NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M 512MB graphics processor. The Phoronix Test Suite software was used for carrying out all of these tests autonomously and in a fully repeatable manner. The test profiles included Lightsmark, Nexuiz, World of Padman, 1080p H.264 video playback, Apache, PostgreSQL, C-Ray, 7-Zip, x264, IOzone, PostMark, Threaded I/O Tester, John The Ripper, Gcrypt, GnuPG, and our custom battery-power-usage test.

On the following pages are our benchmarks comparing Ubuntu 9.10, Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2, and the very early look at the Fedora 13 performance.

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NVIDIA's binary driver had not worked properly with the Fedora Rawhide packages so the OpenGL / video tests were only carried out under Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04 Alpha 2. The NVIDIA 190.53 driver was used in all cases to eliminate any binary driver differences and to just show any impact that other changes within the Linux stack had on the gaming / graphics performance. With Lightsmark, Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 wound up being about 18% faster than the 9.10 release.

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The popular Nexuiz game had ran at effectively the same speed between 9.10 and 10.04 Alpha 2.

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There were no performance differences either with the ioquake3-powered World of Padman.

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When looking at the CPU usage with our video-cpu-usage test profile using the X-Video decode interface, the CPU usage had deviated between the Karmic Koala and Lucid Lynx, but in the end, the averages ended up being close to each other.

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The Apache test had troubles with Fedora 13, but here it shows the Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 performance to be significantly worse off than Ubuntu 9.10. This may partially be due to the upstream EXT4 performance regressions in the Linux kernel that we have extensively talked about, which would also cause the Apache performance in Fedora 13 to suffer in comparison to Fedora 12.

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PostgreSQL's performance continues to suffer dramatically under Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and it is not expected that it will change at all for this next Ubuntu release. This major drop in the number of transactions being carried out per second is due to an EXT4 file-system change designed to provide better data safety but with a significant performance penalty. This matter is talked about in Autonomously Finding Performance Regressions In The Linux Kernel. The PostgreSQL performance also suffers in Fedora 13 and any other Linux distributions using the Linux 2.6.32 kernel. Even with Fedora 13 being much earlier into its development cycle and carrying some debugging options by default (along with using SELinux), Fedora 13 Rawhide performed quite closely to Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 in this test.

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The C-Ray ray-tracing performance was close between all three distributions with no winner.

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Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 and our Fedora 13 snapshot both performed better than Ubuntu 9.10 at running the 7-Zip compression speed test. At this point in the Lucid Lynx development cycle it is producing approximately 15% more MIPS than under the Karmic Koala with the same hardware.

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Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 and Fedora 13 are also outperforming Ubuntu 9.10 when it comes to the x264 video encoding performance. The advantage here for Ubuntu 10.04 was +18%. Fedora 13 2010-01-13 wasn't quite as fast as Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2, but it's nothing to fret about considering the debugging options and that Fedora 13 hasn't even reached an alpha state yet.

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The IOzone 8GB write performance was the same between Ubuntu 9.10 and Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2, but Fedora 13 (2010-01-13) was noticeably lower: 66 vs. 52 MB/s.

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Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 regressed when it came to the 8GB read performance in IOzone, but Fedora 13 was reading at even a slower rate.

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The PostMark disk performance between Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04 Alpha 2 was close while Fedora 13 was behind, but again given the debugging options used during the development cycle and its pre-alpha state we aren't worrying too much.

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Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 was slower than Ubuntu 9.10 when it came to random writes via the Threaded I/O Tester.

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There was not anything too interesting with the Blowfish numbers produced by John The Ripper.

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The numbers were also close for the CAMELLIA256-ECB Cipher with the Gcrypt library.

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Again, no major regressions.

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Looking at the battery power usage for this notebook when we switched it to run off of its 6-cell battery for this test, Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 was more energy efficient than its predecessor. On average Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 was consuming one Watt less, which happened as less energy was being consumed while the Lenovo ThinkPad T61 was idling but before the test had signaled the display to turn off via DPMS, which looks like Ubuntu 10.04 is just being more aggressive with dimming the display when on battery power and idling.

Overall, there are both good and bad performance improvements for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Alpha 2 in relation to Ubuntu 9.10. Most of the negative regressions are attributed to the EXT4 file-system losing some of its performance charm. With using a pre-alpha snapshot of Fedora 13 and the benchmark results just being provided for reference purposes, we will hold off on looking into greater detail at this next Red Hat Linux update until it matures. You can run your own tests though if you wish using our open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking platform.

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