apache on Ubuntu 22.04 is several times slower than on other distros, according to Phoronix

[Oibaf]

Dear Maintainer,

according to this recent Phoronix test apache on Ubuntu 22.04 (as well as on Debian) is several times slower than on other distros:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=h1-2022-linux&num=7

It is not entirely clear how the test was performed, and given the test says version is 2.4.48 it may be using a custom build apache version and not the Ubuntu package.

Also it may be an issue not strictly related to apache, since that test shows that other tests are also a lot slower on Ubuntu.

Nonetheless, given that apache is a common work usage on Ubuntu server, I report this issue in case someone has interest in checking what's going on.

Thanks.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

Hi Oibaf,
we (myself any many other Ubuntu developers I know) have seen the results. And as you said they were interesting but not always entirely clear how they got created.

The majority of the differences I've seen where on things like:
1. Install&run less other services - you could do that just as well on Ubuntu, we just come with a more comfortable default
2. Enable less optional features - they might stall other things
3. Compile things with more processor optimizations
4. Enable speedup features that only work on some platforms/systems
5. Tunables optimized for one, but negative for other workloads

For example tunables - quite often one can tune a system with tremendous results if you happen to know the particular workload. But most of the time such settings would degrade just as many other users as they would help others - or worse.

Many HW features will - if enabled - exclude certain types of hardware entirely. There are many case by case decisions.

We generally do these decisions on every feature, tunable and optimization as they come up. And each time we ask ourselves like "does it bring enough value to a majority of our users". We neither bluntly "enable all we can find" nor "disable all that we can".

Ubuntu is designed to to work out of the box on a wide variety of Hardware and for a wide variety of user groups - hence we can't always use all the same config options used by others.

There is always work ongoing, evaluating features and optimizations (gladly in recent years many optimizations are written in a way to dynamically load and not add overhead otherwise) and tunables.

So you can be reassured that this test as well as feature/performance discussion in general wasn't missed. But this bug isn't about any particular change that one can fix/not-fix - or at least discuss about.
Therefore I'll mark it as "opinion" to reflect that since - as of right now - no one can really act on it.

If you - or anyone else - have individual "how about this feature/optimization/tunable" thought, by all means file a bug about it. There one can have a per case discussion.
But as I mentioned above "just helping a few while degrading others" is unlikely to become the default, that kind will always stay per user config with their workloads in mind.