CentOS 5.4 vs. OpenSuSE 11.2 vs. Ubuntu 9.10 Benchmarks

With the release of CentOS 5.4 last month to bring this community enterprise operating system on par with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, we decided it was a good time to see how the server / workstation performance between this new CentOS release compares to that of Ubuntu 9.10, which was released last week, and also how it performs up against the release candidate of OpenSuSE 11.2. In this article are these benchmarks.

The server and workstation oriented benchmarks we ran in this article across these three distributions were Apache, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Dbench, IOzone, Threaded I/O Tester, C-Ray, GraphicsMagick, John The Ripper, timed MAFFT alignment, GROMACS MD, NAS Parallel Benchmarks, and SPECViewPerf 9. All of these tests were run through the Phoronix Test Suite with Bardu Beta 1 . CentOS 5.4, OpenSuSE 11.2 RC1, and Ubuntu 9.10 were all tested with their default packages and settings, with the exception of disabling SELinux on CentOS.

CentOS 5.4 is shipping with an updated Linux 2.6.18 kernel, GNOME 2.16.0 desktop, X Server 7.1.1, NVIDIA 190.29 display driver, GCC 4.1.2, and uses an EXT3 file-system by default. OpenSuSE 11.2 RC1 runs with the Linux 2.6.31 kernel, GNOME 2.28.0, X Server 1.6.5, NVIDIA 190.29 display driver, GCC 4.4, and uses the newer EXT4 file-system by default. Lastly, with Ubuntu 9.10 we have the Linux 2.6.31 kernel, GNOME 2.28.0, X Server 1.6.4, NVIDIA 190.29 display driver, GCC 4.4.1, and an EXT4 file-system. For all three Linux distributions we were using the x86_64 builds. The final releases of Ubuntu and CentOS were used, but due to OpenSuSE 11.2 not yet being officially available, we had used its first release candidate. The hardware for this test system was made up of an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 clocked at 3.00GHz, a Gigabyte EP45T-DS3R motherboard (P45 + ICH10R), 2GB of DDR3 memory, a 160GB Western Digital WD1600JS-00M, and a NVIDIA GeForce 8600GTS 256MB graphics card.

 

Starting with the Phoronix Test Suite's Apache test profile, there was actually quite a bit of movement between the three distributions. Coming out in front was Ubuntu 9.10, which averaged more than 22% more requests per second than the second place contender, CentOS 5.4. Well in last place was OpenSUSE 11.2 RC1, which was running at 57% the speed of Ubuntu Karmic.

While OpenSuSE started in last place, with the PostgreSQL test it offered the best performance. OpenSuSE 11.2 RC1 was 29% faster than Ubuntu 9.10 and 120% faster than the EXT3-using CentOS 5.4.

OpenSuSE and Ubuntu lagged far behind CentOS 5.4 with the SQLite test, which is no surprise. EXT4 with the Linux 2.6.31 kernel offers hideous performance with SQLite in comparison to EXT3 and other kernel revisions using EXT4. It took 23 seconds on CentOS for 10,000 insertions into a SQLite database in comparison to about 800 seconds for OpenSuSE and Ubuntu.