AlmaLinux, CentOS Stream, Clear Linux, Debian, Fedora & Ubuntu On AMD 4th Gen EPYC Genoa

First up was the WireGuard and Linux kernel network stack stress test. Common to all three top contenders in this benchmark is that they -- sensibly -- use the "performance" CPU frequency scaling governor by default unlike the rest. Particularly when running on server hardware it's rather silly most Linux distributions still defaulting to the "schedutil" governor (or ondemand / powersave) rather than the performance governor that still can idle reasonably well. It's too bad more Linux distributions aren't defaulting to the performance governor when on server CPUs/hardware. But even with AlmaLinux 9.1 and CentOS stream 9 defaulting to the performance governor, Intel's Clear Linux still showed a significant win with its WireGuard secure network tunnel performance thanks to its additional tuning/optimizations.

Of course, there isn't a dramatic difference for all workloads but like NAMD when running its official Linux binaries ends up performing about the same across the eight Linux distribution releases tested.

OpenJDK Java performance is one of the areas that can still differ a lot for the out-of-the-box performance between distributions. Granted, you can easily move to an alternative JVM or upgrade to a newer OpenJDK release if so desired, but for those looking at the stock Linux performance is where Clear Linux tended to provide the fastest Java performance without any extra steps.

While still defaulting to OpenJDK 11, it was good to see Ubuntu 23.04 daily in its current development form offering faster performance in some of the Java benchmarks compared to Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS and Ubuntu 22.10.