“With Debian 6.0 “Squeeze” set to be released in the coming
months, we have decided to run a set of benchmarks looking at the
performance of Debian 6.0 across different sub-systems relative to
the performance of Debian 5.0 “Lenny” and Debian 4.0 “Etch” to see
how this new release may stack up.“We have already benchmarked Debian Squeeze when looking at the
Debian GNU/kFreeBSD performance with its new kernel, Debian
GNU/kFreeBSD vs. Debian GNU/Linux, and Debian versus
Fedora/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/OpenSolaris. In this article, we are just
looking at the performance of Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 versus its
predecessors. We went back through Debian Etch for benchmarking,
which was released in 2007 and the first to come that shipped with
the Linux 2.6 kernel by default, migrated to the modular X.Org
stack, and replaced GCC3 with GCC4. The particular releases we
tested were Debian 4.0r9, Debian 5.0.6, and a Debian 6.0 testing
snapshot with its beta installer.“Debian GNU/Linux 4.0r9 had the Linux 2.6.18-6 kernel, GNOME
2.14.3 desktop, X.Org Server 7.1.1, and GCC 4.1.2. Debian 5.0.6 was
tested with the Linux 2.6.26-2 kernel, GNOME 2.22.3, X.Org Server
1.4.2, and GCC 4.3.2. Lastly, Debian 6.0 is currently carrying the
Linux 2.6.32-5 kernel, GNOME 2.30.2, X.Org Server 1.7.7, ad GCC
4.4.5. All three Debian installations used the EXT4 file-system by
default. Both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Etch, Lenny, and
Squeeze were tested.”