Linux 5.15 LTS To 6.17 Benchmarks: Four Years Of Kernel Improvement Net 37% Improvement On AMD EPYC
The Nginx HTTPS web server has improved nicely since the Linux 5.15~6.1 LTS kernel days. Even for simple HTTPS serving of static content the newer Linux kernel versions provided nice performance gains on this 3rd Gen AMD EPYC server used for testing the kernel releases of the past four years.
Overall there have been some very nice kernel gains made over the past four yeas of major Linux kernel releases. Best of all Linux 6.16 and 6.17 Git are continuing the trend and looking to be in very good shape ahead of Linux 6.18 that will likely be this year's LTS kernel.
When taking the geometric mean of over 60 different benchmarks, the geo mean positioning shows the major advancements of the Linux kernel since Linux 5.15 LTS in 2021. On the same exact hardware and the same operating system/software with just changing the kernel versions, there have been some terrific Linux kernel optimizations these past four years. This testing was on the mature AMD EPYC 7773X server platform and for 4th and 5th Gen AMD EPYC are even greater kernel performance improvements to enjoy with AVX-512 support and there being some nice cryptography optimizations for AVX-512 CPUs and other kernel optimizations benefiting those newer CPU cores.
From Linux 5.15 LTS to Linux 6.17 Git was a 37% performance improvement. Very nice gains from software with Linux 5.15 LTS being the long-term support kernel when AMD EPYC Milan-X first debuted. Even over Linux 6.12 LTS from last year was 11% better performance with Linux 6.17 Git. The Linux kernel performance continues moving overall in the right direction.
CPU POWER
Equally important is that overall there was no significant increase in CPU power consumption on the newer kernels. Linux 5.15 LTS for the dual AMD EPYC 7773X processors had a 292 watt average and 642 Watt peak combined while the Linux 6.17 Git kernel had a 299 Watt average. From the Linux 6.1 through 6.12 kernels tested there was also some higher CPU power usage that also inflated the averages but under Linux 6.16~6.17 the AMD EPYC server was in very good shape.
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