AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux remain two of the most popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux derivatives that are maintained by the open-source community. With the recent Rocky Linux 10 GA release that followed the recent AlmaLinux 10 release for re-basing against Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance of these popular downstreams compared to RHEL 10.
With AlmaLinux 10.0 and Rocky Linux 10.0 being derived from the same sources as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0, the performance is expected to be the same just as it’s been on prior RHEL releases… And it is. With not going the route like Oracle Linux 10 with its Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel alternative, the Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux downstreams should perform just like Red Hat Enterprise Linux itself (and the CentOS upstream) along with maintaining binary compatibility.
Barring any unexpected build problems or other unanticipated regressions, AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux should perform just like Red Hat Enterprise Linux for these community-supported distributions. Given the recent 10.0 releases, I ran a number of Linux server benchmarks just to confirm no regressions, no special juice out of RHEL, or other unexpected performance differences compared to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.
With my testing on an AMD EPYC 9755 2P (EPYC Turin) server and using the same hardware across all tests, the performance of Rocky Linux 10 and AlmaLinux 10 were right on-par with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 itself. Hence the best kind of boring benchmarks when the performance is right on track for where it should be.
Clean installs of AlmaLinux 10.0, Rocky Linux 10.0, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0 were carried out at the defaults for each distribution on this AMD EPYC 9005 series server. Besides the performance being nice and level across all three tested enterprise Linux operating systems,. there weren’t any problems encountered in running either of these community-supported RHEL-based distributions.
As already shown, there are nice performance benefits going from RHEL 9 to RHEL 10 and similarly those upgrading from Rocky Linux 9 or AlmaLinux 9 to the new 10.0 releases should similarly find nice performance advantages on modern Intel and AMD servers.
