A Look At Ubuntu 10.04 To Ubuntu 18.04 Linux Performance
The Core i7 990X saw a significant boost in EXT4 performance going from 10.04 LTS to 12.04 LTS, but dropped with 14.04 LTS (possibly due to the Spectre/Meltdown patched kernel during the installation process) and since then it's been the same performance on 14.04/16.04/18.04. With the Sandy Bridge i5-2500K, the performance is similar to the i7-990X with basically being the same from 14.04 to 18.04. With the newer Ivy Bridge i7-4960X, its random read performance was similar from 14.04 to 16.04 but has seen a significant drop off with the current 18.04 daily snapshot.
With the random write performance, the i7-4960X system also saw a significant drop in performance from 16.04 to 18.04 development while the other two systems performed about the same.
The sequential read performance has been steady the past three Ubuntu LTS releases on the i7-990X and i5-2500K boxes, but the i7-4960X system with its VisionTek SSD saw a significant drop in performance with Ubuntu 18.04.
And it's a similar story with the sequential write performance.
There are some slowdowns in the FS-Mark performance on recent Ubuntu LTS releases.
CompileBench is seeing some slight drops in performance on the three systems when comparing 16.04 to 18.04, but at least the performance is still better than with 14.04.