7 ms·
Ubuntu 18.04 vs. 20.04 LTS Performance Preview
- Raphaellll 7y agoThis is again deep linked to a specific test page.
- michaelcampbell 7y agoYes, specifically the page with the overview.
- oweiler 7y agoHow feasible would it be to run a current Ubuntu on an older i5 with 4GB of RAM?
- ce4 7y agoShould run fine, especially if you use an SSD. You're free to use any of the lightweight desktop environments (lxde, xfce, mate, etc.). The remainder depends on your workload/usecase wrt. to mainly RAM-requirements for tabbed browsing (or electron apps). The RaspberryPi 4 also only has up to 4GB of RAM and is capable of driving 2 4K screens.
- O_H_E 7y agoThat IS my daily driver. A quad-core i5, but I can't imagine a dual core struggling that much. 4GB of ram is fine for any linux distro itself but might not be good enough for a browser-centeric workflow. I get around that by using extensions like Tab-Discard or TheGreatSuspender to "pause" unused tabs. Using a userland oom-killer does help a lot with deadlock situations (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22833471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22833471) I wouldn't still recommend Gnome (Default Ubuntu), any other desktop would be lighter on RAM and CPU. KDE, MATE, or Budgie are all great. I do have a speedy SSD though, when I was on my HDD the pill was quite harder to swallow.
- qchris 7y agoThis has been my experience as well. I do a lot of work on a computer running 18.04 with an i5-5300U (2 core, 4 thread), and the change between having an SSD instead of an HDD was probably the single largest performance improvement I've had because of a component change.
- skrtskrt 7y agoI just tried out both Ubuntu (gnome) and Mint (Cinnamon) on a 2015 MacBook Air, dual core i5 with 4 GB RAM. Mint was noticeably snappier - I really didn't enjoy Ubuntu, but a lighter desktop will probably make the difference. Another comment talked about the RPi 4's capabilities, but mine had multi-second input lag running a fresh install of Ubuntu/Gnome on a single 4k screen.
- Piskvorrr 7y agoRPi4 had significant, hardware-based performance issues in v1 of the board...
- magicalhippo 7y agoDo you have any links to this? I know about the USB-PD issue which they fixed in v1.2, but that's about it.
- Piskvorrr 7y agoI think it was all bound to this - power issues make weird quirks throughout the system.
- dhimes 7y agoThe difference is astounding in virtualbox. Ubuntu Gnome is nearly unusable- mint works pretty well. Using i3 for Ubuntu helps quite a bit.
- chrismorgan 7y agoWith i3 (no GNOME elements at all, and precious little desktop environment stuff), I think my old 1920×1080 laptop tended to idle at using around 60MB of RAM. With 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD, I never set up swap, and over the course of four years or so this only bit me about three times, and I spent a lot of that time running two substantial Firefox sessions, a 2GB RAM VirtualBox VM and a handful of other things like urxvt, Inkscape and Chrome all at once.
- Piskvorrr 7y agoRunning LXLE (essentially tweaked Lubuntu) exactly on that, and it FLIES. A SSD disk also helps a lot.
- suby 7y agoFrom maybe 2015 to 2017 I used an i3 (I forget the clockspeed) dual core processor with 4 gigs of ram daily working as a web developer. It wasn't even on an ssd. It depends on the type of work but for what I was doing it was fast enough. Granted I was using Mint with the Cinnamon desktop but i'm sure Gnome with Ubuntu would have been fine too. I installed Windows 10 on it for a few days to try it out and the difference was night and day. The laptop would pause for about a second every maybe 15 seconds or so, which wasn't a thing on Linux.
- hajile 7y agoLinux works fine on that little RAM, but if it's an older machine, you should check out the price to upgrade. Spending $30 on 8GB would be a huge quality of life improvement. At 4gb, I'd also look at lubuntu. The UI uses less RAM than Gnome and at that amount of RAM, 1-200MB is significant (plus, LXDE uses less CPU power too). I actually run i3 on a lot of older systems to save even more (but you'll have to learn how to using tiling systems -- not hard, but something more to learn nonetheless).
- jmunsch 7y agoThat's awesome. Also very cool to see u2f/fido support for ssh. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FocalFossa/ReleaseNotes https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FocalFossa/ReleaseNotes
- fullstop 7y agoAwesome! Love my yubikey.
- bdamm 7y agoYEAH!! Finally. Trying to assemble my own rube goldberg machine for key access is exhausting.
- unixhero 7y agoWhat? What do you mean? Could you show an explanation of what you're trying to achieve? Genuinely interested.
- bdamm 7y agoUsing a hardware token as the authenticator for SSH sessions. Taken to the fullest, this allows you to completely avoid password authentication for SSH, except for the initial upload of your public key.
- unixhero 7y agoThanks! That makes sense. I don't get the name, but this is what we call that now?
- bdamm 7y agoU2F/Fido refers mainly to doing through the browser, but as you probably know, the browser is only the end of the line of a long chain of usability oriented changes. It's been a decade in the making. Now SSH is using that mechanism, just not through the browser. Personally I'm psyched, lots of apps can start using this approach and get a great user experience!
- user5994461 7y agoNo explanation why Ubuntu is 10-30% faster in most of the benchmarks? That's a lot. Maybe something to do with better spectre/meltdown mitigations in the newer kernel?
- skibz 7y agoPage one of the article explains how the rig was configured, noting various security things. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=xeonr-ubu1804-2004&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=xeonr-ub... https://openbenchmarking.org/embed.php?i=2003242-NI-XEONCASCA60&sha=93568c9&p=2 https://openbenchmarking.org/embed.php?i=2003242-NI-XEONCASC...
- fsh 7y agoIt's worth keeping in mind that they are running benchmarks on a massive dual-socket 48 core machine where slight tweaks of the scheduler can have a big effect. I would be very surprised to see such big differences on a normal desktop or server.
- simfoo 7y agoWhat's a little confusing is that they are not testing the same versions of the software but (presumably) the distro default version. So these benchmarks are not useful to test kernel and lower level performance differences.
- pmontra 7y agoTheir goal was testing two versions of Ubuntu (as per the title), that includes every difference between them. Example: Ubuntu 18.04 upgrades Linux up to version 5.3, Ubuntu 20.04 comes with 5.4. There are several other upgrades. They are listed in the first page of the post.
- hajile 7y agoMost of it seems to be down to newer packages and newer compiler versions.
- 7y ago
- bzb3 7y agoDoes this apply to computers that do not have Intel Xeon Scalable processors? Because if not, that's a glaring omission from the title
- _eht 7y agoThey probably just stopped including Amazon referral malware.
- andy_ppp 7y agoHas anyone benchmarked this against https://clearlinux.org/ https://clearlinux.org/ ? EDIT 1: To answer my own question: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu2004-clear-intelamd&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu20... With a pre release Ubuntu 20.04 Clear Linux is slightly faster. EDIT 2: tldr; AMD 8% faster in Clear Linux, Intel 14% faster. AMD is miles faster (20%) than Intel in almost everything on Linux.
- tiffanyh 7y agoClearLinux is the dark horse doing amazing things that the HN community seems to shun.
- cies 7y agoWhere other distros then learn from so people not willing to go with Intel's toy project can enjoy them.
- andy_ppp 7y agoI have no idea if it is a toy project or not? Do you have evidence things are often broken for example?
- cies 7y agoToy in the sense that it's fully at Intel's whims.
- andy_ppp 7y agoSo Ubuntu is also a Toy project because it's fully at Ubuntu's whims?
- cies 7y agoWell, they are not a chip giant, so they actually have make money off of it. Intel could drop this project anytime, and not see any difference in revenue, and many have questioned the backstory of this distro.
- bdamm 7y agoSome of the specific performance enhancements are quite remarkable. Almost double the performance with PHP? Wow, that's quite the optimization for a long-lived (legacy?) technology. And the improvements in ML number crunching are in some cases just as impressive. Remarkable work within the community to wring more performance.
- hedora 7y agoThe geometric mean across the tests is 25% faster. That shouldn’t happen. Was there something wrong with 18.04?
- reddotX 7y agognome