Initial Benchmarks Of OpenSUSE Leap 15 vs. Leap 42.3 vs. Tumbleweed
The random read and write performance is significantly better for openSUSE Leap 15.0 over 42.3, largely due to going from the Linux 4.4 to 4.12 kernel series and the many improvements during that span. With the Phoronix Test Suite when running as a user executing tests from the home directory, these tests are primarily stressing the XFS partition.
The sequential read and write performance was also much better as judged by FIO. As for the differences between Leap 15.0 and Tumbleweed, besides the kernel version difference, Leap is defaulting to "none" for its I/O scheduler on this NVMe SSD while Tumbleweed uses MQ-Deadline by default even with this same drive.
In SQLite, the embedded database performance was roughly the same between these Leap releases while openSUSE Tumbleweed with its newer kernel was slightly faster.