On Wednesday 19 March 2003 12:17 pm, Tom Brinkman wrote: > On Wednesday March 19 2003 10:23 am, Per Øyvind Karlsen wrote: > > why are everyone so obsessed about "optimizing" their packages? in > > most cases it only gives marginal perfomance increase and often > > introduces weird bugs and performance penalties.. > > > > here's a little example: > > http://www.mandrakeforum.org/article.php?sid=2472〈=en > > That's been my experience. The only 'speed' benefit compiling > for athlon is pyshcological ;) Building for i686 Intel proccessors > can actually be a step backwards.
My experience is that you are correct for all optimizations up to athlon. I think that it is a different story when you get to athlon-xp. On my machine, using athlon-xp optimizations, rebuilding core packages like XFree, KDE, etc. definitely provide better responsiveness or crispness in the gui. I'm not sure how to benchmark this though. I had already planned on trying to benchmark the effects of optimizing gcc itself for athlon-xp, I'll have to give some thought to how to provide empirical evidence of performance improvements of the rest of the system. -- Greg
