On 03/14/2013 09:28 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote: > On 14/03/2013 14:12, Pandu Poluan wrote: >> On Mar 14, 2013 4:14 PM, "William Kenworthy" <[email protected] >> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: >>> 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. >>> >> This. >> >> Why I prefer Gentoo over other distros: Full control. >> >> I mean, I can (and do) leverage "-march=native". And I certainly have an >> overly long USE flags... but it's the sheet satisfaction of knowing that >> my system is MY system that made me stick with Gentoo... >> >> It's eminently satisfying -- a geekgasm, if you will -- to know that >> one's kernel is lean and customized, all the toolchains have been tuned, >> and there are no useless things being installed... >> >> In regards to performance, the benefits might not be groundbreaking, but >> it's there, and when your server is being relentlessly hammered by >> requests, Gentoo seems to have additional breathing space where other >> distros choke... > > Gentoo excels as a -dev system where your devs need to test things in > different environments. > > A classic case is different pythons. We have many Centos 4 machines in > production that run python-2.4, the developers naturally run something > bleeding edge like 2.7 or 3.3 on their laptops. > > Many many times they need to know if their bespoke code runs properly on > Centos, or PyPy or whatever other valid environment difference could > happen in the real world. > > Tweak USE, tweak the masking and let emerge world do it's thing. Now the > dev can do valid tests. If the dev machines are VMs, snapshot them just > before starting this and you have the best possible solution for my money. > > Or, try remove LDAP, NIS and PAM support for auth from a RHEL machine to > test if it works without those things in place. > RHEL? Impossible. > Gentoo? Trivially easy. "Trivially easy", of course, means an emerge -euDNtv world && emerge -ctv && revdep-rebuild -i && revdep-rebuild ... ehehehe
I dunno, it might actually be easier to setup the said distros in a VM. And if those configurations don't work, you shouldn't have to support them, eh? ;)
