On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 12:10:03PM -0800, Jeff Hobbs wrote: > > Is there a real downside to only building AOLserver with gcc > > (other than the lack of full 64-bit support on platforms that > > have it)? > > I have not tested it, but reports are that gcc generates slower code > on every platform that it's available on where a "native" compiler > also exists. YMMV.
That was definitely our experience on Solaris (SunOS 5.8), at least as of a couple years ago. Sun cc seemed to be consistently faster than gcc 2.9.x. I don't remember what program we were using to make that comparison, nor how big a difference it was, but my vague memory is that the performance was often substantial. >From looking at my old AOLserver 3.x Makefile, I'm pretty sure I did compile AOLserver 3.3+ad13 with Sun cc and that it ran fine. But I don't think I did any real speed comparisons with AOLserver, that "Sun cc is faster than gcc" conclusion was from some other entirely different codebase. And of course, for similarly priced hardware, I'd bet that running gcc-compiled code on an x86 Linux box is typically going to still be substantially faster than Sun cc compiled code on Sun hardware. :) On x86 Linux though, I know HPC folks sometimes use the Intel or other compilers rather than gcc, specifically to get more performance. That's for number crunching though, whether network oriented code like AOLserver would see similar benefits, I've no idea. -- Andrew Piskorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.piskorski.com/ -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with the body of "SIGNOFF AOLSERVER" in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
