Performance feedback

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Hello all,

I’ve read on the top that questions shouldn’t be posted here, but this is more like asking opinions, since I’ve not installed OpenSUSE yet. I hope this is the right place for this, but I’ll gladly repost it in another category if this one’s incorrect.

Well, I’ve been dual booting Windows and Debian 12 for a while now on my personal desktop, and I’m fairly comfortable and familiar with Debian at this point… however, I’ve seen numerous benchmark on various channels where OpenSUSE, specifically Tumbleweed just blew every other distro in all testing (usually those done in various Blender scenarios, Uningine Superposition, Geekbench, webBase, etc), like, for a very large margin.

This kept bugging me to try Tumbleweed. I’ve a fairly dated hardware (Phenom II X4, GTX960, 12GB RAM DDR3, a good computer for mid 2010s haha) which has been more than enough for me, since I don’t play anything new, mostly emulators which are heaven on Linux, but I keep thinking maybe I can still extract a little more power from this setup.

I just wanted to ask you guys opinions and experiences regarding performance. I did experience a good leap in performance when going from Windows to Debian, and from what I can see on those benchmarks, most distros are fairly equivalent on performance, except Tumbleweed which always seems to be very much ahead of the others… it all seems too good to be true, but I wanted to ask anyway.

Have any of you guys indeed experience a good improvement on performance by going with Tumbleweed? Is there something really special about this distro? Or does it all really depend on usage and personal configuration, as always?

I thank anyone that might provide answer to this question in advance!

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We’ve been with TW for 10+ years. It really wasn’t about ultimate speed - that’s just a side effect.

It’s about flexibility and choices for us. Do you want xxx or yyy, no doubt you’ll get it. And also having the newest

Why not install it as a virtual machine to test it yourself ?? Better than reading a bunch of opinions :+1:

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Thanks for your reply aggie!

Indeed, OpenSUSE seems a very mature distro at this point with lots of option for anything imaginable you might want, and TW guarantees you’ll also have the latest.

I’m pretty sure I can set it up to be very usable and comfortable, being a matter of just getting used to zypper and yast, so it’s no doubt that with a little patience and searching, it’s gonna be a good experience.

Unfortunately, when it comes to performance, I can only get a glimpse of it when installing on a VM, since there’s no good way to mirror my actual bare metal setup, but it’s a good starting point anyway, of course. So, while testing on a VM or even on another computer is a very good way of test driving TW, I also think it’s valid to see what other users might’ve experienced on their side too regarding performance, since they’d have installed directly on their physical setup also and experienced by themselves, like what I’m trying to do.

Regardless, I thank you very much for your feedback :slight_smile:

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Performance is dependent on the tasks you’re using the system for, as well as how the OS is optimized and how you’ve configured the system.

Most benchmarks are, IMO, useful as a rough guideline, but ultimately if, for example, you have a slow disk channel, you’re going to struggle with whatever is on the system if it’s I/O bound (for example). Or if it’s network-bound and has a slow NIC, that’s going to be the bottleneck.

It’s important to understand the nature of the workload to determine how the benchmark is going to apply to your use case.

That said…yes, I have found TW to be a solid performer. I also have a fairly high-end system - 36 cores, 128 GB of RAM, SSDs for the OS and /home partitions, high-end nVidia card (3090ti). Blender screams on it running cycles. Stable diffusion can generate an awful lot of images in a short period of time (depends on which model I’m using - one model - the sdxl turbo model - can do over 1,000 images an hour).

But I do sometimes hit bottlenecks - running multiple virtual machines simultaneously and doing something disk-intensive (like, say, applying OS updates to 10 different VMs simultaneously) can slow it pretty significantly. Not for lack of CPU and memory, but because I’m saturating the disk channel, and the CPU has to wait for the disk I/O operations to finish.

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Reading Phoronix - Tumbleweed is not the fastest.
Tumbleweed uses BTRFS by default, which is COW, that means it slower in disk usage, especially in write.
The fastest Linux is Clear Linux from Intel, or Gentoo after special tuning.
To get fast machine you need x86-64-v3 CPU or newer (with AVX2 & other stuff).
Phenom II doesn’t support x86-64-v2. 12 GiB of RAM hints on absence of dual channel memory usage. You can install Phenom II X6 + 16 GiB RAM + SSD (including NVMe).

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Hello hendersj and svyatko, thanks for yout replies!

These feedbacks are very important, and very much aligned with what I’ve been seeing.

Personal usage and tuning will dictate performance most of the time, and that’s why you see so many channels and forum posters affirming that it usually doesn’t matter your distro choice, as usually they’ll offer a very similar experience (same DEs, similar ammount of packages in their repositories, etc), and that’s up to your choices and expectations of what you want from the distro.

That being said, it’s very good to know how the OS performs on a high end setup and see that it gets bottlenecked only by hardware limitations as I/O speeds.

I’ve also read the Phoronix article, actually through an Ars Tecnica analysis of the Phoronix one, and indeed, Clear Linux is the clear winner, but TW is the one immediately behind, still above the others. When you consider that the community for TW seems much more active (I don’t recall really seeing anyone saying they have Clear Linux as their daily driver), I think support for TW is still a more safe bet.

Your responses have been very spot on and grounded. I can make a better decision about either to go with TW or not, but things seem very positive :slight_smile:

Thank you all very much

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@WaltzNightray Hi depending on your locale, I’d stooge around ebay for options, I picked up a HP Z440 Workstation, with a 4 core Xeon V4 cpu (TPM 2.0 capable), 16GB of ECC RAM and a Nvidia Quadro K620 GPU for US$100.00 late last year. The GPU has another year or so of support as well…

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@WaltzNightray
If you have the disk space, you could do like I do. I leave a large enough unallocated space on my drive so that when I am curious about another distro, I have the room for small but reasonable / (system) and /home partitions. I create those, install to them, and play around with the distro for awhile just to get my own sense of how it would suit me.

I find openSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed to both be great performers on older PCs. My current main system is from 2015, but I am also using a few laptops quite a bit older with great (for me, at least) performance.

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In some cases performance can be to do with whether you are using an SSD hard drive or not; my laptop with SSD storage for everything zips through things which my older desktop takes ages to do. As I have the same version of openSUSE on both with all the same updates, this is clearly nothing to do with the distribution but with the hardware.