Ubuntu 50% slower than Debian?

I've moved a greenfield project from Debian 9 to Ubuntu 20.04 so we can use php 7.4 on an LTS distro. The system isn't live yet, but the Laravel http response times on Debian are about 80-110ms whereas Ubuntu it's 140-160ms.

The only thing different is the OS and php 7.3 on Debian, 7.4 on Ubuntu. Could PHP have lost that much performance between versions, or is Ubuntu that much slower?

Server specs, Debian is worse on paper!
- Debian = 1vCPU, 1.7gb, 10gb HDD
- Ubuntu = 1vCPU, 3.5gb, 15gb SSD
Connecting directly to the server's public IP with no SSL
Not a live system so no load other than healthcheck pings running in the background every minute
The databases are the same, Postgres 12, and they are light on data and identical.
The server setup is the same, nothing fancy, just Apache and supervisor and base PHP installs with a few extensions.
Both in the same data centre on Google Cloud
PHP packages are the same
The page measured on is the homepage, which basically does nothing other than render a blade view
Laravel versions are the same, 6.18.26 and the code is identical

Any other thoughts?

bobbybouwmann

5 years ago

Level 88

Debian is, in general, faster than Ubuntu. Ubuntu has some other dependencies that make it perform a little bit less. I think the response times you get are still pretty good though.

You can see a benchmark between the two here: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=3900x-debian-ubuntu&num=2 (You can see more benchmarks through the sort of hidden pagination above the related articles)

dailysleaze

5 years ago

Level 1

Thanks for the link. I'm generally impressed with the response times and the Google cloud stack is pretty good, it's just I don't want to be installing php packages into Linux, which is what it would take to get php 7.4 even on Debian 10 https://wiki.debian.org/PHP

Its's basically that those response times are for the simple pages, but the more meaty pages may get even slower, i'd prefer not to lose 40-50% just for the hell of it. Many of the site's users will be far from cloud-based datacenters (Africa) or on flaky internet connections, so keeping the speed as good as possible is paramount.

Maybe then it's a choice between best performance and most recent php version (which is counter intuitive 😂)

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