OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva Benchmarks
OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, and Fedora were the three Linux distributions that ran with the Parallel BZIP2 Compression test profile and the fastest one was Ubuntu. Ubuntu was nearly 6% faster than its fastest competitor, OpenSuSE, while Fedora had trailed in third. All three of these distributions were using the EXT4 file-system.
Moving to benchmarking the Apache static web-page serving performance with all four Linux distributions, Ubuntu again was the fastest. OpenSuSE was in second followed by Mandriva in third. Fedora had really lagged behind in this test with its performance at averaging 443 requests per second compared to 10,000+ with Fedora and OpenSuSE. This may be attributed to SELinux on Fedora, debugging options, or a combination of other factors.
OpenSuSE had beat out Ubuntu by an incredibly small margin when it came to the GnuPG file encryption performance. To encrypt the 2GB sample file it took 34.98 seconds on average for OpenSuSE, 35.30 seconds for Ubuntu, and 40.07 seconds for Mandriva. Results for Fedora were not available with this test.