I've a niggling feeling there was discussion about some performance drops on 16.04 not all that long ago, but I'm completely failing to find it in my emails.
The OpenStack-Ansible project has noticed that performance on Ubuntu 16.04 is quite significantly slower than on 14.04. At the moment it's looking like possibly a GCC related bug.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/python2.7/+bug/1638695