A Look At Ubuntu 10.04 To Ubuntu 18.04 Linux Performance
The networking performance for the most part is showing better results as measured by Netperf with the newer LTS releases.
The SciMark C benchmark shows nice performance improvements with the progression of Ubuntu LTS releases. In this case GCC is mostly to be thanked for its optimizations and other code generation enhancements over the past eight years.
The TTSIOD CPU-based multi-threaded renderer shows some nice gains in performance too with succeeding releases, except for the i7-990X taking a significant dive in performance after Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
The x264 video encoder also shows the i7-4960X and i5-2500K improving with succeeding Ubuntu LTS releases. But interestingly the i7-990X here did see a big hit to performance after 12.04 LTS and still isn't as nearly as fast as this Gulftown system was during 10.04/12.04.