performance tests conducted on 7.04, 7.10, 8.04, 8.10rc

[Chris Cheney]

Since they only tested on i386 this (aiui) could at least be partially
explained by the security enhancements made to Ubuntu. I don't know what
all has been changed but I believe at least -PIE was added to binaries
at some point. There was discussion about this at a UDS and the fact
this would cause some slowdown for i386 in particular since it doesn't
have enough registers.

Depending on if tracker and compiz was enabled on the Phoronix test
system they may have also contributed somewhat to the slowdowns they
experienced.

Also there is some sort of issue with disk io not being fairly
distributed between apps. I noticed this past week on Intrepid if in
transmission I run a large torrent file check that Evolution and Pidgin
won't even be able to repaint due to waiting on disk io. However I'm not
sure how long this issue has existed.

Chris