Intrigued by my recent benchmarking exercise I decided to take a look at the various operating systems’ performance on a common virtualisation platform.
Given the ubiquity of Amazon Web Services I thought this would be the ideal platform to run the benchmarks on. Again I’ve kept it simple, this is the Geekbench Overall Score result for OpenSolaris 2009.06, Ubuntu Karmic and CentOS 5.4 running on basic Amazon m1.small instances.
As per the HP hardware tests, Solaris comes out top again. It’s a slim, 3%, margin over Ubuntu, but a quite significant 7% improvement over CentOS.
An interesting point there is the performance improvement of Ubuntu over CentOS. What is it that Ubuntu do to Linux to make such a leap in processing capability from RedHat’s version?
I’ll take a more detailed look at the results in another posting, and I’ll be trying a bit of ‘real world’ benchmarking of these three platforms – a comparison of Apache web page serving performance.
The gap between Ubuntu and CentOS (Red Hat) can be explained: Red Hat is ultra-conservative in its use of kernels, and ends up with old(-ish) ones, with myriad backported fixes. Ubuntu is closer to the current Linux kernel, with all those accumulated go-faster stripes…
That’s my theory anyway ;)
And I suspect they use more modern compiler options too. Is it the case that RedHat still compile practically everything as i386?
Whatever, OpenSolaris was *still* quicker ;-)
hey, warning – it is an offtopic :)
i’m looking forward for some kind of update of how to run opensolaris in PV mode under xenserver 5.6. any chances to do that?
Hi Michal. Given that OpenSolaris is more or less dead I don’t think we’ll be wasting any time on trying to resolve this I’m afraid.