Is Ubuntu Getting Slower? 544
An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix has a new article where they provide Ubuntu 7.04, 7.10, 8.04, and 8.10 benchmarks and had ran many tests. In that article, when using an Intel notebook they witness major slowdowns in different areas and ask the question, Is Ubuntu getting slower? From the article: 'A number of significant kernel changes had went on between these Ubuntu Linux releases including the Completely Fair Scheduler, the SLUB allocator, tickless kernel support, etc. We had also repeated many of these tests to confirm we were not experiencing a performance fluke or other issue (even though the Phoronix Test Suite carries out each test in a completely automated and repeatable fashion) but nothing had changed. Ubuntu 7.04 was certainly the Feisty Fawn for performance, but based upon these results perhaps it would be better to call Ubuntu 7.10 the Gooey Gibbon, 8.04 the Hungover Heron, and 8.10 the Idling Ibex.'"
"That's quick" (Score:2, Informative)
"That's quick" was the phrase my girlfriend after an update of Debian Sid to include KDE 4.1 and OpenOffice.org 3.0 from Experimental. "Wish my slow machine at work was this quick".
You don't have to guess what OS she is using there...
Anyhow, once you replace 3.5.x with KDE 4.1 you will notice a difference. At least I did. (No, I didn't read the article first... Bad boy.)
Security Patching? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What hardware? (Score:5, Informative)
When you test new software on old hardware of course it's going to be slower though.
That's hardly a given, lots of software gets better as it ages - new features are added, but also performance tweaks get added.
The problem is that software should be getting quicker on the same hardware, the alternative is bloaty apps that no-one wants to use. See Vista for the ultimate conclusion to that. You don;t want Ubuntu to end up the same, so its good that someone is pointing out performance issues. Hopefully the next release will have a few of these issues looked at and improved.
Yes, absolutely! (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, Ubuntu is getting slower, absolutely, without question on my part.
My single biggest complaint against 8.04 was that it could not get out of its own way to play an MP3 on my somewhat modest hardware (Via MII-12000). It runs fine on my wife's machine, however (AMD Sempron on Via MoBo).
Now, it is possible that the slowdown is only with 32-bit versions. My wife's machine is running the 64-bit version, and seems to run pretty well. In the mean time, I have reverted to Slackware, which has always been my refuge.
Re:software versions? (Score:1, Informative)
They were using the Phoronix Test Suite. By saying they ran 1.4.0 Beta 1 it can be found all of the versions they were using. The Phoronix Test Suite syncs to specific versions and builds them from source no matter the OS.
Re:xubuntu (Score:5, Informative)
Xubuntu's performance targeting appears limited to choice of desktop environment, which was a small component of what these benchmarks tested. The big performance increases the article talks about were in databases, compilers, encryption, memory access, and audio/video encoding/decoding, none of which really have much to do with the desktop environment.
Re:Ubuntu isn't getting slower, no. (Score:3, Informative)
OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office: slower too? (Score:2, Informative)
It's called Wirth's Law
Xorg, mainly. (Score:4, Informative)
Meanwhile, 2D performance on Intel's hardware is smoking everyone else's pipe.
Re:What hardware? (Score:3, Informative)
OS X regularly gets noticeably faster each release on the same hardware.
Mind you, they did start from the horribly unoptimised dog called 10.0.
Re:Look carefully at the power management (Score:3, Informative)
Yes! In particular check the "ondemand" CPU scaler. That thing just doesn't work very well. It takes too long to trigger the higher clock speed and if you have multiple CPU's and/or are running lots of quick processes then the clock will constantly be shifting between speeds. This totally kills the performance.
I turned off the CPU scaling on my Ubuntu workstation and I disable it on my laptop when I need maximum performance.
This can be fixed with two changes to the ondemand profile. First it should bump all CPU cores to the higher speed no matter how many processes/threads are requiring performance. This is necessary because the kernel shifts threads between cores and you don't want to keep switching speeds on the various cores as it does this. Second is to add a delay before dropping the speed of a CPU. This allows time so that new threads/processes have full speed immediately.
Re:Performance Problems AREN'T Where You Think... (Score:5, Informative)
Variable elimination has been done, to varying extent, by multiple people here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/131094 [launchpad.net]
Re:Look carefully at the power management (Score:3, Informative)
Most CPUs cant allow cores to run at independent speeds...
On the other hand, AMD quad cores do, and i'm glad to have one core running full speed processing a single threaded program, and the other 3 cores as slow as possible to handle the background OS tasks..
Re:You're completely wrong (Score:5, Informative)
In other words, Ubuntus' not getting slower. The software that Ubuntu bundles is getting slower.
Ubuntu is the software that it bundles.
Re:OH NOES!! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:No wonder you posted AC (Score:4, Informative)
i seriously doubt anyone will say that OSX 10.0 runs slower on a 4 year old 1gb ram intel chip than OSX 1.5.whatever.
Try it. Seriously. The 10.0 kernel had a significantly inferior VM subsystem (10.5 improved it a lot). 10.3 and 10.4 introduced more GPU-offloading in to the windowing system. Each version of OS X has been faster on the same hardware, although 10.4 and 10.5 have been more RAM-intensive.
Re:No wonder you posted AC (Score:3, Informative)