Revisiting Linux Part 1: A Look at Ubuntu 8.04

File/Networking Performance

Finally we have file and networking performance. As Ubuntu uses a different file system (ext3 versus Windows’ NTFS) there’s the potential for some significant differences here.

Starting with file performance, we will be using a collection of roughly 1500 files, totaling 380MB.

Even after SP1, file performance has long been a thron in the side of Vista. Here it manages an embarrassing loss to Ubuntu, taking over 50% longer to make a copy of the same folder.

Looking at ZIP compression times, it’s an even larger gap. Vista needs 75% longer to compress the same folder. While compression can be CPU bound, looking at our data this specific test is largely I/O bound. We’ve already established at Windows’ built-in ZIP abilities are pretty bad, but we’ve never figured out why this is.

Decompression is even worse for Windows. It takes nearly 4 times as long to decompress the same archive. It’s not even a contest – Ubuntu wins, if only because it’s the only competent operating system out of the two.

Meanwhile in our network copy tests, we are copying that folder to a server running Windows Server 2003. This gives Windows an advantage since we’re using SMB, but since SMB is the predominant protocol for consumer file server gear, it’s a fair test of such use.

Here it’s nearly a dead heat. Both Ubuntu and Vista need just as long to copy our file collection to the server, meanwhile Windows needs a bit less time to copy that same folder off of the server.

Switching gears, using a 2.6GB ISO we see a clear performance difference. In both copying to and from the server, Ubuntu needs at least 50% longer. Since this test isn’t using a lot of CPU time, our best guess is that Windows is doing some buffering that Ubuntu doesn’t get to do. The transfer rates for Linux are below what the hard drives on either end can manage.

Ultimately for users with lots of local storage, Ubuntu appears to outshine Vista. But for users with lots of remote storage (e.g. a NAS), Vista outshines Ubuntu.

Finally we have the amount of time it takes to start up each operating system, another disk-bound test. Vista is not something I would consider particularly speedy, so I’m a bit surprised that Ubuntu did not manage to outperform it here. The 2 second difference is measurable, but small enough that it won’t make any real impact.