On Mon, Mar 17, 2003, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote about "Re: Request for update on the current Linux Distributions.": > On Mon, Mar 17, 2003 at 09:21:38PM +0200, Nadav Har'El wrote: > > The guy basically asked for a "faster distribution". With all due respect > > to the various distributions and their specific advantages and disadvantages, > > significant speed difference isn't one of these things. Other that +-10% >... > But your reply just shaked my memory about some distribution a few years > ago which was about compiling the entire Linux (based on Debian, maybe?) > with the most optimization options possible, they used to have quite > faster execution times back then (30%+). Does anyone rememeber what I'm > talking about? What happened to them?
Maybe you're referring to "gentoo" that do such a compilation. It's very hard to obtain more than 10%-15% speed increase from gcc just by compiling for a specific processor (say 686) instead of 386. I believe, though, that even if there were a 30% speed increase in desktop applications you wouldn't be able to notice it... By the way, for some applications the run-time itself is not the problem, but the problem is the annoying start-up time, with dozens of shared libraries, or interpreted script files, being loaded on every run. Some applications, like Emacs and TeX, solved this by dumping precompiled code. KDE improved this by allowing "prelinking" - see for example prelink(8) (it was written by a guy from Redhat, but every distribution can add it). Of course, a distribution can also contain statically-linked executables for improved performance - but I've yet to see any of those (other than Embedded Linux distributions). -- Nadav Har'El | Tuesday, Mar 18 2003, 14 Adar II 5763 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Seen on the back of a dump truck: http://nadav.harel.org.il |<---PASSING SIDE . . . . . SUICIDE---> ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
