Improved Grails performance with Ubuntu 10.04 and Intel i5 cpu

The last Ubuntu release had some performance issues with the "turbo boost" feature found on Intel i5 cpu's.

Really simple benchmark

Before I installed the new version I wrote down some run times of a Grails command. After installing Ubuntu Lucid I repeated the same test. I ran "grails test-app unit:spock" four times, ditched the first run and took the average of the next three runs.

Result

Before the upgrade the average time for running the 25 unit tests was 11,2 seconds, after the upgrade this was reduced to 9,3 seconds. A nice performance boost!

The gain might be coming from multiple sources:

• Improved Intel i5 support in the Linux kernel
• Newer JDK (OpenJDK 6b16-1.6.1-3ubuntu3 vs. 6b18-1.8-0ubuntu1)
• Due to ext4 performance regressions I decided to go for xfs instead.