Ubuntu 8.10 significantly slower than previous versions

[Timo Jyrinki]

I wonder how this discussion is able to drift so much away from the
actual subject on both ubuntu-devel and ubuntu-devel-discuss. Many
people do not want to believe results or just point out one or two of
them are meaningless (like NVIDIA graphics performance with closed
drivers is not that interesting).

2008/11/6 mr <mrintegrity at gmail.com>:
> According to the recent benchmarking article by Phoronix, the previous two
> releases of Ubuntu are significantly slower than Feisty Fawn. In some cases
> this can be seen as up to 50% performance drop with certain desktop tasks.

Yep. I found three important points I list below, sound encoding
(video might be because of changed default parameters, dunno), SQLite,
compiling.

1. See eg. the page:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_bench_2008&num=4
It takes about double time to encode mp3:s, ogg:s or flac:s In Ubuntu
8.04/8.10 vs. earlier. Fedora seems to have been affected by the
problem all the time:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=fedora_test_2008&num=2

2. SQLite is over two times slower in Ubuntu 8.10 vs. earlier:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_bench_2008&num=5

3. Compiling has been almost two times slower in Ubuntu than Fedora
after Ubuntu 7.04:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=fedora_test_2008&num=2

The 1. and 3. is what I'd worry about. 1. in general and 3. because
Fedora is almost two times faster.

(from later in the thread)
> The default scheduler is optimised for general desktop usage, where you
> have a large number of simultaneously running applications, applets,
> etc. and each one needs to be responsive.

Please, everybody, do not take this as granted. Question it, test it,
feel it etc. With the default CFQ, I could not do about _anything_
when I did eg. svn update or Firefox churned through its enormous
databases on a laptop hard drive. After changing to elevator=deadline
these cases work _much_ smoother without visible regressions
elsewhere.

-Timo