Did this few years back for an online magazine sponsored by a local linux sysadmin company who wanted to see the difference between generic debian and optimised (not necessarily gentoo, but thats what I used.)
Difference in times was ~10% across the board for graphics manipulations (gimp scripts), spreadsheet tasks (gnumeric) and the like. The "kicker" - simple optimisations gained far, far more than generic compiler settings. e.g., initially, the gnumeric versions were slightly different, with some wild times across the tasks. Make em the same version (and cuedos to the gnumeric maintainer for jumping in and helping diagnose/fix the problem - newer version on gentoo was heaps slower :) and there was little difference. Shared libs like glibc didnt make a huge difference, but being smart about how/what a "particular" task was handled gained more. If a debian app was compiled with similar options as to gentoo, little difference between them in performance which considering shared libs etc wasn't what I expected. The intel compilers are/were said to be a lot better than gcc, not sure if the gap is still there (supposedly 20% better again) Its how long is a piece of string kind of question if considered OS wide, but pick a narrow task and optimise away with smart programmers and you will do well on almost anything. Big advantage of gentoo - configurability, version control (what version is installed and changing it at short notice) and general flexibility. 10 % on software is a lot better than forking out $$$ on faster hardware to do that (as gamers do!), but at the end of the day, I can also make my car go faster by painting the diff red (urban myth/joke from my hotrodding days:) and see roughly the same performance boost - i.e., probably wont notice it in real life) BillK On 14/03/13 16:15, Dale wrote: > Howdy, > > I was wondering. Has anyone ever seen where a test as been done to > compare the speed of Gentoo with other distros? Maybe Gentoo compared > to Redhat, Mandrake, Ubuntu and such? > > Also, I read that Nasdaq runs a modified version of Gentoo. Do any > other large corps run it that we know of? > > I googled a bit but couldn't find anything. Maybe my search terms > wasn't good enough. > > Links would be nice. > > Dale >
