The Ubuntu Server: Slowly Gaining Acceptance

A friend of mine just switched from Ubuntu Server to Debian Lenny on his Dell Poweredge server and got a big speed boost. A fluke? Or did any of you also have performance problems with Ubuntu Server?

Anecdotal evidence can be hard to analyze accurately. There are lots of variables. Did he switch from ext3 to reiser? bam. big performance increase. Were there performance problems with the ubuntu install? I've seen atrocious performance with sata drives, which were fixed with a new release, and it's improved sata detection and support...

So sure, if he switched from an older ubuntu release to debian lenny, he'd get a nice speed boost from the newer kernel and it's associated performance improvements. Of course, he could get the same performance increase by switching to a newer ubuntu release.

I've been switching servers from suse to ubuntu and seeing very good performance. Without more information about his particular case it's hard to tell what was going on.

Quoting:Did he switch from ext3 to reiser?

Nope. Still Ext3.

Quoting:Were there performance problems with the ubuntu install?

Apparently, but we never noticed. The previous server (that also ran Lenny) was a dog slow dual Pentium II 233 Mhz. So the new server was a giant speed boost anyway. We never noticed it should have been even faster.

Quoting:I've seen atrocious performance with sata drives, which were fixed with a new release

What release? The server does use SATA drives. He was running Ubuntu 9.04 by the way. Not an old release. Package-wise it's even newer than Debian Lenny is.

Linux on a 286? Neat trick.

@gus3 Must be a mistake... the fastest 286's ever shipped that I know of ran at 20MHz, and as far as I know none of them were SMP capable. I bet he is talking about a Pentium II. That was the Intel primary processor family during the era where 233MHz was a common clock speed, and there were dual processor motherboards available.

At one time there was a project to port Linux to the 286 called ELKS though, but I think it is long dead.

Last activity notes for ELKS: Oct. 2006.

Too bad. I mean, if Geoworks Ensemble could get paging to work on an XT, I'm sure it could be made to work for Linux, too.

Quoting:Linux on a 286? Neat trick.

I got my two's mixed up. It was a Dual Pentium II (A HP Netserver LC3 to be exact). I fixed my post above. That's what you get for still posting at 2 AM :-)

At 2AM you should be just getting warmed up.

What kind of geek are you? ;-)

He didn't have any Red Bull (or Jolt) today, I guess :)

Never, caitlyn. That stuff is poison to your health. I quit drinking soda/soft-drinks all together a coupe of months back. I'll stick with moderate amounts of normal coffee, tea, water and fruit juices.

Phoronix has been reporting major performance problems with the kernels in intrepid and jaunty with SQLite (the version in lenny is not affected) that have been fixed in .29. I think the problem is likely with the kernel version being used -- using hardy would be a better idea.

@gus3 Yes, Linux on a 286 should be possible because I've seen Xenix and other Version 7/System III variants running on 286 hardware. Running may not quite be the proper word though... limping might be more appropriate. I actually did some work with Xenix back in those days (1987-1989 if memory serves). It was unusable for the code I was trying to port to it because of the crappy Lattice supplied C compiler. None of the 16 bit memory models supported would handle large enough arrays of unions to handle the data structures in the code which was originally written for 4.2 BSD on a VAX 730 which was a 32 bit processor with true hardware virtual memory. Funny thing was that even the slowest 386's running the Linux circa 1993-1994 were comparable in performance to the VAX 730 if they had at least 4M of RAM. On a lark I actually built the slowest Linux box possible at one time using the standard kernel and components running at their full rated speed... A cast-off Packard Bell 386SX-16 with 2M of RAM an OAK video chip and a 40M Miniscribe IDE hard drive with about the slowest access speed imagineable... like 70 or 80ms. It took like 10 minutes to boot into Linux and come up with a login prompt, hard drive thrashing madly the whole time. It took another couple minutes after login before it came up with a shell prompt... And starting up X took another 10 minutes or so, just to bring up a spartan olvwm desktop and a couple more minutes to start up an xterm...

Quoting:What release? The server does use SATA drives.

I was using SLES 9 at the time (2005-2006 timeframe I think) - but I imagine this would apply generally to distros using a kernel of a similar vintage e.g. ubuntu 6.06

Quoting:He was running Ubuntu 9.04 by the way. Not an old release. Package-wise it's even newer than Debian Lenny is.

9.04 has some well known performance issues. When I build ubuntu servers I install hardy, which will be maintained until 2013.

From my personal standpoint, on my personal hardware, I'm finding it hard to even think about giving up 8.04 ...

@Steven: 8.04 is an LTS release and will be supported until 2011. Why give it up if you're happy with it?

I've kept my 8.04 UNR install (factory plus all the patches and upgrades) on my Sylvania box because it just plain works. My netbook is in a triple boot configuration and I've been known to load a fourth or fifth distro onto an SD card or USB stick to give it a quick look :) Hardy UNR stays on the first partition and isn't going anywhere.

Having said all that I will admit that Pardus 2009 has really opened my eyes. It's the first distro other than the factory install where everything has just plain worked right out of the virtual box. It's nice to have some of the latest and greatest software without sacrificing performance. Pardus has probably bumped VectorLinux as my favorite desktop distro. Vector held the title for about three years. I've even been able to slim it enough to run well with an Xfce desktop on the old Toshiba. I may even have to play with pardusman (the Pardus equivalent of SUSE Studio) to create a lightweight version :)

As always, YMMV... If you are satisfied with something there is no reason to change.