[ubuntu-studio-devel] Studio 19.04 vs XUBUNTU 19.04 vs dual quad Xeon

[Mike Squires]

My desktop is a Supermicro X7DAE dual quad core Xeon (2Ghz), with a 1TB 
RAID 1 boot device and a single 4 TB archive device running off a 3ware 
9750 PCI-E card.  A second RAID 5 array running off an older 3ware 9550 
PCI-X card is currently off line (drives pulled).  Video is a ATI/AMD 
5500 PCI-E card.

History:

Ubuntu Studio (using "Studio) afterwards) 16 ran fine; v 18 was 
extremely slow once installed, taking many minutes to complete simple 
tasks.  I ran 19.04 but although faster than 18 it was still much slower 
than 16.

I have since switched to XUBUNTU 19 on the same hardware, speed is OK.

The major issue seems to be disk speed.  Untarring my "/home" directory 
using 19 takes most of a day; XUBUNTU does it in 2 1/2 hours.  A crude 
speed comparison shows that Stuido 19 takes 7 seconds to copy a file on 
the 4TB drive to /dev/null while XUBUNTU takes less than 1 second.  
"iostat" shows Studio running at under 5 Mb/sec while XUBUNTU clocks 
between 30 and 50 Mb/sec.

Speeds using "unixbench" (the old Byte UNIX benchmark) don't seem to 
show a major difference between Studio and XUBUNTU, except in single CPU 
file copy speeds where Studio is about 20% slower.

One observed difference is that when running "top" the Studio system 
spends about 40% of its CPU cycles in "wait" status; XUBUNTU is close to 
zero.

I am now running a production environment using XUBUNTU on a 2 TB RAID 1 
array and a test Studio environment on a 1.5 GB RAID 1 array; with the 
3ware card I can just plug/unplug.

I would like to experiment with going from XUBUNTU to Studio using the 
process that I think I saw discussed where an upgrade package could be 
applied to an existing XUBUNTU installation.  If I can break the install 
into its component pieces it may be possible to determine where the 
Studio version is different.

Thanks,

Mike Squires

(In case anyone is wondering:  my primary home computer started with a 
Tandy XENIX 68K box in 1986 after running one at work in 1985 
(..!ncoast!sir-alan!mikes).  I moved to 386BSD/FreeBSD about 1990 and 
currently use a quad Opteron box running FreeBSD as the house server 
with a single CPU box as the firewall/router behind a Comcast box.)

-- 
Michael L. Squires, Ph.D., M.P.A.
546 North Park Ridge Road
Bloomington, IN 47408
Home phone: 812-333-6564
Cell phone: 812-369-5232
www.siralan.org or www.smithgreensound.com
UN*X at home since 1985