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.'"
What hardware? (Score:5, Insightful)
Were they testing each distribution on exactly the same hardware?
If so, that sounds completely fair to me that it would be slower. Go and (try to) install Vista on a machine that originally came with XP (pre-SP1) and see how much slower it is. Is that a fair test either? I think not.
As software gets more useful (and Ubuntu has, Vista not so much) it gets bigger and thus gets slower on the same hardware. Hardware advances at the same time though, so in real terms they keep about equal. When you test new software on old hardware of course it's going to be slower though.
Re:What hardware? (Score:5, Insightful)
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That would be true if software was given 100% CPU devotion. But software doesn't operate in a bubble like that and hence other needs are given CPU time, in turn slowing things like the LAME encoder down.
It's something worth noting though, it's a real performance hit and perhaps something can be done about it in future releases.
Re: (Score:2)
Completely true. For example, the Ibex has much better support for various hardware, and comes with the software and drivers to suit. By default, beryl etc. is enabled for many graphics cards. Gnome's network manager is there too, to support the GSM connections, etc. etc.
Apart from the fact the LTS releases mean you get security updates for years for certain older versions, there are a host of flavours explicitly aimed at low-end hardware, such as xubuntu.
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.
Re:What hardware? (Score:5, Insightful)
I heard this argument a wee too often. Maybe software should be more useful while at the same time NOT getting slower? Maybe that would be a good thing, as it would then run well on netbooks as well, what do you think?
Re:What hardware? (Score:5, Insightful)
You make it sound like it is inevitable and acceptable that newer software is slower than older software. I disagree. For one thing, one way to improve software is to make it faster. This is actually done sometimes. Secondly, even if you add features to software (which is another way to improve software), that doesn't have to make the software slower. In some cases, this may be inevitable, but in many cases it is not.
I personally see computers, and software, as tools for making life more efficient. When software becomes slower, efficiency is actually lost. When this isn't offset by providing me with a more efficient work flow, I lose efficiency. Since efficiency is the main reason I use computers in the first place, this is a big deal.
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That assumption, that software gets slower as newer versions come out, is the "Windows Effect". People have grown up with Windows bloatware and assume that behavior is the norm. They are more concerned with adding new bells and whistles and not revisting existing code. When I work on software releases one of the main things we do is not only add new functionality but improve the performance of existing code, especially by taking advantage of new hardware/db tech features.
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Re:What hardware? (Score:5, Funny)
(Hey, he used an absolute, I'm entitled to extrapolate it to its logical implications.)
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So adding features does not have performace implications provided those new features are never used. Great.
Would you make us a list of software in the development of which you've been involved, so that we can avoid it?
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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.
"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.)
Re:"That's quick" (Score:5, Funny)
How many geeks have heard such phrases: " "That's quick" was the phrase my girlfriend after..."
Alas.
You're vastly overestimating the situation (Score:2)
baby steps man... baby steps.
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Having said that in another few months I will definitely make the switch - because I really liked what I saw and the direction it was heading in.
You expect more functionality to run slightly slower - that is if you assume the original implementation was part way o
How significant? (Score:2)
As we add complexity and layers of abstraction things tend to slow down in general. If hardware keeps up, and actual human productivity increases, do we have an issue?
I'm all for lean and mean, but it's quite possible to optimize a distro for speed as well. Ubuntu getting slower is not a good thing, but slower is better than harder to use. Netbook distros can be optimized for the hardware in question, after all...
It would be interesting to see how these tests perform across distros, or with a kernel optimiz
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I'm glad someone made the point. It really is irrelevant how fast the OS performs microbenchmarks. What matters is how fast the user gets things done. If you spend all day encoding MP3s so be it. But for a lot of people, a kernel that's half as fast but makes some complex things simple is the way to go.
Anyway, that's Apple's philosophy, and why you see Apple not caring so much about kernel benchmarks. That being said, every version of MacOS X has been faster than the last one the same hardware despite
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``As we add complexity and layers of abstraction things tend to slow down in general. If hardware keeps up, and actual human productivity increases, do we have an issue?''
You have that exactly right. Software getting slower is bad, but it's ok if it is offset by other changes, such as faster hardware or new, more efficient ways to perform tasks. In the end, it's our productivity that counts. Now the real question is, how do we measure that, how has it developed over time, and what changes have had the great
xubuntu (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Real men (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Real men (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory [xkcd.com].
Re:Real men (Score:4, Funny)
software versions? (Score:2)
Some of theses tests such as the SQLite test I am wondering if they used SQLite within ubuntu or they build and run it on the system they were testing.
This matters because Ubuntu comes with different versions of SQLite.
However if there is a problem then I hope they report it on launchpad. I have noticed any slowness myself.
Security Patching? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Security Patching? (Score:5, Interesting)
Good follow up would be to figure out specifically where - is it due to kernel changes? Then the problem may not be Ubuntu...
Re:Security Patching? (Score:5, Interesting)
I would like to see if this is an Ubuntu issue or Linux in general.
What about Fedora, OpenSuse, and Debian? How do they compare to Ubuntu?
Look carefully at the power management (Score:5, Interesting)
If you look closely you'll notice that (a) the benchmarks were run on a Thinkpad T60 laptop, and (b) there were significant differences on some benchmarks like RAM bandwidth that should have little or no OS components.
This sounds to me like the power management was dialing down the CPU on the later releases...
Re:Look carefully at the power management (Score:5, Interesting)
Mod parent up.
Many of the benchmarks (such as the lame, Java and RAM bandwidth benchmarks) are CPU-bound, and will run the majority of time in userspace. As the kernel should only be invoked for timer ticks, interrupts, TLB misses, etc (which would probably account for less than 1% of the CPU time), and change to the kernel should have minimal impact on the benchmarks.
The parent's comment that power settings have been misconfigured sounds spot-on.
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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 bum
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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..
Ubuntu? No way. (Score:3, Funny)
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"Slackware" -- an African word, meaning "Gentoo is too hard for me".
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Re:Ubuntu? No way. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "I'm sick of fucking with Linux in order to get it to do what I want but I really don't like the alternatives."
Yeah, I rocked Gentoo for a couple of years. I just want something that is fast, easy to use and gives me as little of a headache as possible. Linux is Linux and most of the knowledge learned in one distro will carry-over to another.
Re:Ubuntu? No way. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ubuntu gives me some of the strengths I liked (such as a simple, straightforward package manager, wide amount of customization without too much screwing around) without too many of the weaknesses (compiling all software, praying emerging the world doesn't break my desktop, so on and so forth).
It's not a bad distro at all and it's tiring to hear of people slamming it for not being Slackware or Gentoo. This may come as a revelation, but Linux is about choice.
Re:Ubuntu? No way. (Score:5, Insightful)
I was pretty much exactly the same.
Turning point for me was realizing that I was compiling more and more in, just in case I needed it, because rebuilding world just to enable that new USE flag was getting kind of old.
In other words, I was using it like Ubuntu. The only advantage I had was I would compile for -march=i686, and other optimizations which produce binaries which only work on recent CPUs (the '686' class) -- whereas Ubuntu was -mtune=i686, if I remember, so it was possible to run on a 486, but would run best on a 686.
And, hey, there were other things I would turn on that were Athlon XP specific, and so on... then I realized that, on amd64, the optimizations were basically exactly the same -- merely compiling for x86_64 gave me all the benefits anyway. At which point, what the hell -- Ubuntu would necessarily be at least as optimized as my Gentoo.
And, more recently, I've realized that since switching to Ubuntu, I spend much more time actually using the OS, rather than tweaking it. Despite having it already much more customized than any version of Windows ever was, I still don't spend as much time tweaking it as it takes to maintain Windows, let alone Gentoo.
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I'm not convinced they know what they're doing (Score:5, Interesting)
Some of the benchmarks were hardware testing, and those showed variation. They should not, unless the compiler changed the algorithms used to compile the code between distros.
Benchmarking a multi-tasking system like Linux is a tough thing to quantify. The Linux kernel recently had a big scheduler change, this alone could account for shifting benhmark numbers. It may not actually "slowing down," but running multiple programs more evenly. The effective work is the same or better, which would mean "faster," but an almost useless benchmark would look slower.
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Indeed, but supposedly the rest of the system was mostly idle, it shouldn't have slowed down a CPU-bound calculation by 50%, otherwise it's a scheduler regression.
The supposition is not part of the facts. My point was there are some benchmark number that should have remained constant but showed variability.
The benchmark is utterly useless until they can explain the variability in tests that should be constant.
I see what you did there.... (Score:2, Interesting)
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
ha! (Score:2)
Performance Problems AREN'T Where You Think... (Score:5, Interesting)
... they are.
Seriously.
I can see several problems with the testing methodology as is:
* The test suite itself: The Phoronix test suite runs on PHP. That in itself is a problem-- the slowdowns measured could most likely be *because* of differences in the distributed PHP runtimes. You can't just say "hey, version Y of distro X is slower than version Z! LOLZ" because, WTF. You're pretty much also running different versions of the *test suite* itself (since you have to consider the runtime as part of the test suite). Unless you remove that dependency, then sorry, you can't measure things reliably. Which brings me to my second point...
* What exactly are they testing? The whole distro? The compiler (since most of the whole of each distro version is compiled with different versions of GCC)? The kernel? If they're testing the released kernel, then they should run static binaries that *test* the above, comparing kernel differences. If they're testing the compiler, then they should build the *same* compiled code on each version and run said compiled code (which is pretty much what I gather they're doing). If they're testing the utilities and apps that came with the distro, then they should have shell scripts and other tools (which run on a single runtime, not depending on the runtime(s) that came with the distro version). Because if you don't, you have no fucking clue what you're testing.
Honestly, I was unimpressed by the benchmarks. I happen to do performance benchmarking as part of my job, and I can tell you, you have to eliminate all the variables first -- isolate things to be able to say "X is slow". If you rely on a PHP runtime, use *exactly* the same PHP runtime for all your testing; otherwise, you'll get misleading results.
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]
GTK performance stats? (Score:5, Insightful)
The GTK+ statistics are mind-boggling slow. That's what I notice most when I use Ubuntu or Fedora. On my non-Ubuntu laptop, I get the following results for GTK performance:
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs: 3.73s (on mine) vs 43-55s (Ubuntu)
GtkRadioButton: 13s vs 29-60s
I just think that's ridiculous. What did they do to GTK+ to make it so slow?
Xorg, mainly. (Score:4, Informative)
Meanwhile, 2D performance on Intel's hardware is smoking everyone else's pipe.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, hurra for choice. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure some people here are going to be comparing Ubuntu to Vista in regards of getting slower with release, but because it's Linux we have a few more choices.
They make distros that are meant to be lightweight- Anyone with a machine that's a little old, I urge you to try one of them. You'll be pleasantly surprised and maybe find a new favorite window manager/desktop environment in the process. Before you start talking about how joe sixpack doesn't want to try another distro or learn anything about Linux- I'm not talking to Joe sixpack here, I'm talking to you, a slashdot lurker.
Try one of these distros and be amazed at how fast everything is:
Crunchbang Linux [crunchbang.org]
KMandla's GTK 1.5 Remix [wordpress.com]
Or, if you want to be more adventurous, get Arch Linux [archlinux.org] and grab a window manager like Openbox or PekWM. If you go that route, take a look at this Openbox guide that'll show you a nice panel to use, file navigator, and generally hold your hand through the process, here [wordpress.com]. But if you want your hand held even more, someone packaged a panel and file navigator and theme chooser and stuff like that together with Openbox already- Called LXDE. You can just grab that too, should be in any repository.
I do think it's unfortunate for joe sixpack that it's getting a little slower- But for them it's still faster than Vista and XP, right?
You know what they should make? They compile pretty much everything in the kernel as a module, and then they probe hardware and load the right modules each time you boot... It would be cool to be able to do a "Speed up my computer" boot where it loads the modules, and then compiles a kernel with the modules for the hardware it finds compiled into it. Disable things that it hasn't seen their computer use, etc., and then just still probe the hardware to fall back on another kernel if things have changed.
OR, how about loading modules when you actually need them..? And this goes for daemons, too. When you go to listen to something, and it returns that there's no module loaded for sound, how about loading the module then, and then starting the alsa daemon. Have you ever looked at the daemon list for Ubuntu? It's huge. I know I don't need all of those- I know because on the distro I'm on now I only run 3 daemons on boot, and everything works fine.
I don't know. Maybe that's not the solution. But those guys are clever, I'm sure they can come up with something to get rid of the extra daemons and modules running without sacrificing usability. Anyone here have any good ideas..?
Is PIE the primary cause? (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe that PIE (position independent executable) along with some other security enhancements were turned on in Ubuntu around the time the slowndowns showed up. This would definitely cause at least some slowdown on the 32bit version since there aren't enough registers to begin with. I'm not sure if it causes any noticeable slowdown on the 64bit version, since the amd64 architecture has a lot more available registers, which would correlate with the person mentioning earlier that the 64bit version seemed fast.
Re:Performance isn't its raison detre (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's see how that statement works in this situation:
It shouldn't be getting slower, but then again, performance isn't the reason Vista exists.
If you really want performance, run FreeDOS. Otherwise, shut up and get used to progress.
No wonder you posted AC (Score:4, Insightful)
"If you really want performance, run FreeDOS. Otherwise, shut up and get used to progress."
Jeez you're an idiot. I wouldn't have posted that under a registered nick either.
So people should just settle for bloat simply because of the advance of technology? Apple manages to make OS X faster than older versions. Other Linux distros do. Bad software isn't "progress".
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let me fix that for you.
"Apple manages to make OSX faster on new hardware"
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.
it's callled progress.
More features are added because people want them.
thus after a while, the original hardware is no longer the best solution to run the latest version of the OS.
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.
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Re:Performance isn't its raison detre (Score:5, Funny)
See, there's this thing called an analogy. It's kinda like a car...
Re:Cars! (Score:5, Funny)
Analogies are like matchbox cars full of chocolates... you never know how much spillover chinese paint you're going to get.
Re:Performance isn't its raison detre (Score:5, Funny)
An analogy is a simile, metaphorically speaking.
Re:Performance isn't its raison detre (Score:5, Funny)
I think that's a rhetorical tautology.
Re:Why a laptop? What about a desktop? (Score:4, Insightful)
First, I use ThinkPads regularly (due to deep discount available through a workplace contract with Lenovo). The closed-source ATI video drivers are constantly a little off (for example, compiz users will find that videos tend to flicker). I'd really want to exclude that can of worms if I could. Your question about other power-reducing features is also a good one. In any case, though...
The real thing the tests appear to show is that Ubuntu has evolved in such a way that any single process may be slower. However, we rarely use our computers as single-process systems. We want it to be doing multiple simultaneous tasks without allowing any single task to dramatically reduce performance in other areas.
I *believe* the new resource allocation methods in Ubuntu (and the kernel and elsewhere) have improved exactly this sort of performance. However, by not allowing single tasks to hog resources in a way that would degrade the user interface and other running software any benchmark run against that single task would appear to indicate that the system is slower.
The SYSTEM is not slower. The TASK is slower.
That's a trade-off. Do you want single tasks to be faster or the overall responsiveness of the system to be greater?
Re:Performance isn't its raison detre (Score:5, Insightful)
It's nice to see that the Ubuntu fanboys have moved so quickly to 'shut up and like it'.
It took Windows fanboys a decade to get there...
Flexibility and freedom are its raison d'Ãtre (Score:5, Insightful)
I currently have three Ubuntu-based systems. I have customized the GNU/Linux distribution for each system. Anyone can do it.
One of the computers is an old (1998) Thinkpad notebook that doesn't have the video capability to run the full Ubuntu-Gnome GUI well. I do a minimal installation (the minimal CD is an official distribution of Ubuntu), then install about 25 select packages using a script that I call "Thinbuntu". This gives me a very functional GNU/Linux desktop for the old Thinkpad with the Long Term Support of the Ubuntu package system, including updates. It has all the features I need.
Microsoft simply can't compete with this.
Re:Flexibility and freedom are its raison d'Ã (Score:5, Interesting)
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Apart from XP Embedded, where you can choose which parts of the OS are installed.
I've heard of such a beast but never have seen it. I would hazard to guess that XP Embedded isn't accessible to most folks; it's not an option with their standard XP install. In contract, anyone who has access to Ubuntu could go this "Thinbuntu" route.
Re:Flexibility and freedom are its raison d'Ã (Score:5, Funny)
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I can disable services I don't want. I can uninstall (or simply not install at the outset) components I don't need. I have the control panel to customize, e.g., the video depth and turn off video-hungry components.
In all seriousness: at this level (not the recompile level), what's the difference?
Linux (and Unix for the most part) tends to be a lot more modular than Windows. Windows does provide options. But not to the same degree. If you want to really dig in to a Windows system, it takes a lot more shennanigans than it does with a Linux distro (and then you're at the risk of losing all your changes at the next service pack).
Note that this isn't an Open Source thing. Proprietary Unix environments tend to work much in the same way.
One final point - Linux is no silver bullet. You still have to m
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed. I might have to go install something like XPLite or create my own installation media with nlite/vlite. It's really taxing firing up a GUI and unticking a few boxes.
Yes, unticking boxes is easy. So's deleting a file. But what happens after the fact?
Those utilities do look like a step in the right direction. Pity they're from a third party and a complete hack (albiet a very cool looking one). What happens when Microsoft releases a service pack? What happens if you change your mind and want to install a component?
I know with Ubuntu I'm removing a package using the very same tools provided by the base distro. When I update, I only update whats installed. And I know
Re:Flexibility and freedom are its raison d'Ã (Score:5, Insightful)
Not even talking about the advantage of being free:
- for optimization, I can select the window manager
- for optimization, I can select the desktop environment
- I get full compatibility with the open-source ecosystem
- I can install programs from the huge apt-get application universe (including programming languages and tools)
- I run it all from a very short script, unattended
- it is fully supported, with automatic updates and no nonsense
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From time to time I download the newest Ubuntu and check it out to see what all the new fuss is. I am continually disappointed though, and it rarely makes it a week before being purged.
It's not just the bugs and the long app-launch times. It's more than just the gratuitous resource consumption. It's the whole thing... It's bloat on top of eye-candy bloat with a hefty helping of fanboy zealotry.
I love *NIX very much but it is precisely because I love it that I have to point out that something is rotten i
Re:Performance isn't its raison detre (Score:5, Funny)
So the soul-removal procedure went well, I see.
Re:Performance isn't its raison detre (Score:5, Funny)
FYI, actually having sex is usually more fun than declining it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow. +20 jerk-off points for using other people (women, in this case) as props for your own ego.
I mean, misogyny may be the rule at old Slash U more days than not, but you, sir, are a grade-a special asshole.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Performance isn't its raison detre (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Performance isn't its raison detre (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do you think this? I mean do you have a good reason or is it just because you don't like mono?
Take a look at some of the tests.
"Computational: The Dhrystone 2 performance within the BYTE Unix Benchmark was also the fastest on Ubuntu 7.04. There was approximately a 20% drop in performance between 7.04 and 7.10 that remained consistent even in the 8.04 and 8.10 releases. "
This is NOT in mono.
"Database: In our SQLite test of measuring the time to perform 2,500 SQL inserts, the performance hadn't dropped off after Ubuntu 7.04 but instead after 8.04 LTS. In this performance drop it was over 2.5x slower. "
SQLlite isn't written in mono.
"but in our compilation benchmarks we spotted major performance losses following the Feisty Fawn release. It was noticeably slower to compile Apache, PHP, and ImageMagick in the 7.10, 8.04, and 8.10 releases."
GCC isn't written in mono.
I could go on and on but many of the benchmarks have nothing to do with mono at all.
Heck I am not a big fan of mono but your statment is baseless.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd bet almost all of it is the effect of the scheduler. The benchmarks all show single tasks taking longer, but that's not taking into account multi-process performance. Is the desktop still responsive now even with a high-intensity background task running? I'd take that over the task finishing 5% faster any day.
You're completely wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, Ubuntus' not getting slower. The software that Ubuntu bundles is getting slower.
It's likely due to GCC's epic failure to better optimize code as 4.x progresses, but I'm not putting my money on anything until they've tested at least one other distro which builds with a different GCC version.
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.
So Xorg, Linux, GCC == Ubuntu? (Score:3, Insightful)
This would remain true if Ubuntu were replaced with $DISTRO.
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"In this case, Ubuntu is the sum of the software it packages. But if one piece of software is slower, then Ubuntu's not slower, that piece of software is slower. 1 + 1 + 1 = 3, 3 != 1. "
I find your definition of 'sum' interesting.
1 + 1 + 1 = 3
1 + 1 + 2 = 4
If one piece of software gets bigger, sure seems to me like the sum gets bigger too...
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I don't understand this, quite frankly, Windows user mentality of just accepting the state of things.
That's the effect of having a Linux distro to be used by Windows-minded users.
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What goal do you perceive Ubuntu to be moving toward
Fixing bug #1 [launchpad.net], of course.
Re:Had went on? (Score:4, Funny)
He would have been able to finish, had Ubuntu not been so slow that he was never able to finish his papers and turn them in on time.
Re:Had went on? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should I read this FA if the author apparently didn't finish high school?
The anonymous submitter and CmdrTaco's grammar skills have little to do with performance in Ubuntu. RTFA; it makes a good point and I for one hope that this observation is accepted by the Ubuntu developer's and something is done about it.
Re:Had went on? (Score:5, Insightful)
I just read it and found it pretty devoid of information. It is one of those mindless performance reviews in as many pages as possible.
Where are any measurements that look at where performance was lost? Running just the distros does nothing to isolate what got slower. Trying different kernels and different X servers would at least show an attempt at understanding what's going on. Why didn't they compare at least one Ubuntu version with a similar Fedora version, let alone Kubuntu or xubuntu?
As I expected: If a site employs people who can't write and has no editorial control that would weed out a glaring error like this you can't expect anything but quick and dirty superficial work. If an error like this that just jumps at you isn't caught, how many subtle errors in the data should I expect?
Re:Had went on? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should I read this FA if the author apparently didn't finish high school?
Because intelligence and wisdom have nothing to do with "finishing high school"? I've got nothing past GCSE [wikipedia.org]s. Luckily for me, employers in the UK see past that.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Reasons include:
1. Determining if the error is in the article or in the summary.
2. Determining if the article is riddled with errors or if the summary highlights an uncommon occurrence.
3. Determining if the article's substance is good despite presentation and communication problems.
4. Not having a knee-jerk impulse to ignorantly flame strangers on the internet.
The article could be written by a dyslexic, Sumatran orangutan, yet full of useful data. You'll never know.
Re:Ubuntu isn't getting slower, no. (Score:5, Insightful)
Complete bullshit article, doesn't offer any useful information beyond a completely obvious conclusion -- the more features that are added to a given piece of software, the higher the demands on your PC.
I would think that those increased demands should be mostly in the form of slightly (a few MB) higher memory requirements to store the extra code for those features. Adding new functionality should not impact existing functionality. Haven't you heard of the zero-cost principle (idea from C++ and apparently Perl, "you don't pay for (as in take a performance hit from) what you don't use")?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ubuntu isn't getting slower, no. (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
From those benchmarks the one thing that stuck out was that GCC is getting slower.
That's a well-known fact for us source-based distributions/OS users. Compiling everything from source on Gentoo, or the BSDs took a severe performance hit since GCC got more and more slow (for no apparent reason), esp. the C++ backend... But what's slowing Ubuntu down is probably the quality of ASM code generated by GCC, as well as programs being writting more and more sloppily by developers with very fast machines.
Maybe the