Earlier this month marked the general availability of CentOS Stream 9 as the bleeding-edge of Red hat Enterprise Linux 9 development. Since then I've been running benchmarks of CentOS Stream 9 and with modern hardware it's been offering some nice performance upgrades over CentOS Stream 8 / RHEL8 especially with modern hardware platforms like Intel Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" and AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" servers. Here are benchmarks of CentOS Stream8, CentOS Stream 9, Intel's Clear Linux, Fedora Server 35, Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS, and Ubuntu 21.10 on both AMD and Intel servers.
CentOS Stream 9 is the new "continuous-delivery distribution serving as the next point-release" ahead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. CentOS Stream 9 will carry the very latest innovations for RHEL9 and as part of that provide an early look at new hardware support and performance optimizations.
For seeing how CentOS Stream 9 and in effect RHEL9 is looking, I ran some benchmarks on AMD and Intel reference servers with their latest generation processors. The AMD server was with EPYC 7763 2P processors and the Intel server with their flagship Xeon Platinum 8380 2P processors. Both servers were using 512GB of DDR4-3200 memory and an Intel 7.6TB D7-P5510 NVme solid-state drive.
On both of these latest-generation servers, the following distributions were tested after performing clean installs and running in their out-of-the-box state:
- CentOS Stream 8 for looking at the current CentOS 8 / RHEL8 state.
- CentOS Stream 9 is the shiny new release at the bleeding edge of what will be RHEL9.
- Clear Linux as Intel's performance-optimized rolling-release distribution.
- Fedora Server 35 is the latest upstream Fedora release.
- Ubuntu 20.04.3 as the current Long Term Support release.
- Ubuntu 21.10 is the latest non-LTS release and how performance currently looks there ahead of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
A set of a few dozen benchmarks were carried out, focusing in on how CentOS Stream 9 looks compared to CentOS Stream 8 on these latest-generation AMD/Intel servers as well as how CentOS Stream 9 looks in relation to other Linux distributions. Over CentOS Stream 8 / RHEL8, CentOS Stream 9 means going from Linux 4.18 to Linux 5.14, GNOME Shell 40 on the desktop compared to GNOME 3.32, GCC 11.2 as the default system compiler rather than GCC 8.5, Python 3.9 rather than Python 3.6, and many other package upgrades.
Before getting to the individual benchmark results, if looking for the "TLDR" version, here is the geometric mean of all the benchmarks carried out:
CentOS Stream 9 offers substantial uplift over the aging RHEL8 / CentOS Stream 8 state. The AMD EPYC 7763 2P server saw a 12% improvement from CentOS Stream 8 to 9 while the Xeon Platinum 8380 2P Ice Lake server was up by 10% overall. This helped push CentOS Stream ahead of Ubuntu and even Fedora Server. However, the Intel Clear Linux results still show that on both AMD and Intel there still is room for more out-of-the-box performance... Clear Linux was still ~4% faster overall than CentOS Stream 9 on both the AMD EPYC Milan and Intel Xeon Ice Lake servers.
In many of the heavy HPC benchmarks there didn't end up being much of a difference between these modern Linux distributions at play.
While in some cases the default/out-of-the-box CentOS Stream still has room for improvement such as shown by this Xcompact3d benchmark.
One of the areas that have improved nicely with CentOS Stream 9 is better OpenJDK Java performance compared to the stock OpenJDK packages on CentOS Stream 8.
Zstandard performance using the default packaged Zstd implementation on each OS has improved nicely with CentOS Stream 9.
LuxCoreRender was seeing some performance improvements out of CentOS Stream 9 when running on the AMD EPYC server.
The MT-DGEMM benchmark improved very nicely with CentOS Stream 9 and put the performance close to that of Intel's Clear Linux.
In other common workloads, the performance benefit of CentOS Stream 9 tended to be more modest.
There are some Python performance improvements with CentOS Stream 9, but as shown Intel's Clear Linux continues shipping an aggressively optimized Python package.
Likewise, the default PHP package on CentOS Stream 9 is much faster than CentOS Stream 8 (granted, there are application streams for opting to a non-default newer PHP version and the like on CentOS/RHEL 8).
Those wishing to look more at these results and even more data can see this OpenBenchmarking.org result file for all of the data points in full for this initial CentOS Stream 9 benchmarking. In 2022 will be many more CentOS Stream 9 performance tests to come. Long story short, as expected, CentOS Stream 9 does provide better out-of-the-box performance over CentOS Stream 8 on modern hardware.
Link: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=centos-stream-9&num=5