The next version of Ubuntu, whose development has reached the alpha stage 4, is surprisingly fast compared to its predecessor and Ubuntu 8.10 even without implementing the filesystem EXT4.

You can notice the speed difference from the moment you boot up the system. On our test machine Ubuntu 9.04 were able to boot up in just less than 20 seconds where Ubuntu 8.10 required just a bit more than 27 seconds on the same exact system. Ubuntu 9.04 seems to further highly enhance the I/O operations by as much as 20% from Ubuntu 8.10. Further more compilation from source code was more efficient on Ubuntu 9.04 than Ubuntu 8.10 by almost 19%. Our egg drop compilation took around 5 minutes less than it took on Ubuntu 8.10 with the same hardware.

Unfortunately though these advantages does not seems to be as abvious when looking at the compression of MP3 and OGG. It seems our system needed more resources to speed up the process of compression.

Though all this enhancement in performance still without the implementation of EXT4 file system which seems to be the upcoming file systems for most Linux distros with all the enhancements it has for the file system. Maybe by the time Ubuntu 9.04 get released it will include EXT4 file system which will even further boost the system.

Please leave your finding of how Ubuntu 9.04 perform for you to share it with others in the comments area.