Is Arch Linux Really Faster Than Ubuntu?

“Often when we are preparing for cross-distribution comparisons
or benchmarks of different operating systems (like our recent Mac
OS X 10.6 vs. Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 10.04 benchmarks) we are often
asked to include Arch Linux in the mix. This is usually on the
basis of including a rolling-release distribution to provide a
performance look at a constantly evolving distribution with many of
the most recent open-source packages rather than a traditional
distribution with packages that may be months older. Many of those
requesting Arch be included in our testing mix also claim that Arch
performs significantly faster than Ubuntu and our usual test
candidates. The main reason we do not deliver many benchmarks of
Arch, Gentoo, or other distributions that use a rolling release
approach is that they are not very reproducible with their results
since their packages are frequently changing and there are more
end-user customizations going on compared to most other
distributions. However, to test the performance claims of Arch
versus others, we have compared the performance of the newest Arch
2010.05 media against Ubuntu Linux.

“We performed a clean installation of Arch using the 2010.05
x86_64 installation media and then proceeded to install the GNOME
desktop and our test dependencies with packages as of 2010-05-18.
For our Arch Linux packages we ended up with the Linux 2.6.33-ARCH
x86_64 kernel, GNOME 2.30.0, X.Org Server 1.7.6, NVIDIA 195.36.15
display driver, GCC 4.5.0, and an EXT4 file-system. The performance
of Arch Linux was compared to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (also the 64-bit
flavor) with the Linux 2.6.32-21-generic x86_64 kernel, GNOME
2.3.0, X.Org Server 1.7.6, NVIDIA 195.36.15, GCC 4.4.3, and an EXT4
file-system. To rule out the GCC compiler playing any major role in
the performance difference between Arch and Ubuntu, we also tested
out Ubuntu when we upgraded against the latest Maverick Meerkat
packages for Ubuntu 10.10 on 2010-05-18. For these Ubuntu Maverick
packages the most notable version bumps were bringing the Linux
kernel up to Linux 2.6.34-2-generic and the gcc-4.5 compiler.”

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