Linux 5.15 LTS To 6.17 Benchmarks: Four Years Of Kernel Improvement Net 37% Improvement On AMD EPYC
The PostgreSQL database server performance was up first and it's enjoyed some very nice performance gains post-6.1 LTS. Since Linux 6.6 LTS there's been much greater performance for this popular database server and then some much smaller and more incremental gains in the newer kernels since. As for the big gain between Linux 6.1 LTS and Linux 6.6 LTS, it's likely due to some scalability optimizations upstreamed by Intel engineers during that time based on some prior benchmarking in 2023.
The improved performance for PostgreSQL did come with increased CPU power consumption but still the latest Linux kernels are delivering better performance-per-Watt than the old kernel versions by a long shot.
The ClickHouse database server was also showing off some very nice gains during these past four years of major Linux kernel releases. Around 70% better performance in fact from these optimizations. Here the newer kernels didn't show any increased CPU power consumption and thus some very striking performance-per-Watt gains when running the latest Linux kernel versions.