Lucid critical performance regression for Apache and PostgreSQL

[Roman Friesen]

Lucid critical performance regression in Apache and PostgreSQL

Phoronix has tested Lucid performance, where results for Apache and PostgresQL are very bad:
- Apache: Lucid is 25x slower than Ubuntu 8.04 and 17x slower than Ubuntu 6.06
- PostgresQL: Lucid is 9x slower than Ubuntu 6.06 and 4x slower than Ubuntu 8.04
See http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_lts_perf&num=2

They have tested only the Desktop Edition, but nobody is interested in it, people ask:
"How am I supposed to choose Ubuntu for servers with such big regressions in server apps(Apache and PostgreSQL)?"
See http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23149

Please ask Phoronix to perform Apache and PostgreSQL tests on
- Lucid Server Edition
- Lucid Server/Desktop Edition with ext3
in order to clarify this situation and prevent bad marketing for the Lucid release.

[Jeremy Foshee (jeremyfoshee)]

Hi Roman,

Please be sure to confirm this issue exists with the latest development release of Ubuntu. ISO CD images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/ . If the issue remains, please run the following command from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal). It will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report.

apport-collect -p linux 567302

Also, if you could test the latest upstream kernel available that would be great. It will allow additional upstream developers to examine the issue. Refer to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds . Once you've tested the upstream kernel, please remove the 'needs-upstream-testing' tag. This can be done by clicking on the yellow pencil icon next to the tag located at the bottom of the bug description and deleting the 'needs-upstream-testing' text. Please let us know your results.

Thanks in advance.

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[Roman Friesen (krokosjablik)]

This problem was mentioned in release notes
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/1004#Performance%20regressions%20with%20ext4%20under%20certain%20workloads

So, I think, it's not urgent now. But if somebody fill responsible for this issue (me not), please ask phoronix to rerun tests with ext3.

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn (zooko)]

I wonder if this is related to https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/543617 . Note that the 2x slowdown for dpkg mentioned in http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/1004#Performance%20regressions%20with%20ext4%20under%20certain%20workloads is a far cry from the 25x (!!!) slowdown for apache reported by Phoronix.

[Jeffrey Baker (jwbaker)]

Sorry but that Moronix benchmark is worthless. You can't get 784 tps using pgbench on a single 7200RPM disk unless your write commit path is broken. The Lucid value of ~ 80 tps is much more reasonable and probably means that something is finally forcing the Moronix test laptop to commit writes to disk on fsync. This is not a regression, it's an improvement.

[Jeremy Foshee (jeremyfoshee)]

This bug report was marked as Incomplete and has not had any updated comments for quite some time. As a result this bug is being closed. Please reopen if this is still an issue in the current Ubuntu release http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download . Also, please be sure to provide any requested information that may have been missing. To reopen the bug, click on the current status under the Status column and change the status back to "New". Thanks.

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