On Tuesday 23 January 2001 07:52 pm, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote:
> I have a Pentium II 350MHz with 256MB of RAM. Would there be any
> speed benefit in compiling my most often used packages (e.g. the
> Kernel and X) myself? It looks like a good thing to do with faster
> processors (and I would definitely do this if I had and Athlon or a
> Pentium III), but I'm not sure if it'll do much (if any) with a
> Pentium II, since Mandrake is compiled for Pentiums, which is not
> much of a step down from where I am. I am trying everything I can to
> speed up my slightly-slow system. I have already optimised my hdparm
> settings and I plan to switch from ext2 to ReiserFS sometime soon. My
> system isn't slow enough to really consider changing my software
> (e.g. I use Konqueror and GNOME), but it still is a bit kludgy and
> worth trying to improve.
The only possible answer to your questions, is you just have to try
compiling against _your hardware_ and see if you can see or measure any
gain. I doubt you'd see anything.
IMO tho, it's much more important to optimize your hardware. On shop
built or ready made systems there isn't much or any option to do so.
That's the main reason home building and overclocking have become so
popular. For example, I had a p2-350 a few years ago, I ran it at
474Mhz with 128mb pc100 ram at 135mhz cas2, and L2 cache timings at 3
ticks rather than the default 8. It benched better than ready made
p3-500's. About 1½ years ago I swapped out the p2-350 for a p3-450, and
run it at 608mhz (4.5x135), L2 =3, with the old pc100 and an added 128
of pc133 at 135mhz cas2-3-3.
Getting back to your system tho, I can almost guarantee you that
the performance/design of the motherboard your 350's in, how fast you
can set the ram timings, combined with a correspondingly optimized
cache latency change, high rpm HDD(s), etc., would make a lot bigger
difference than recompiling source trying to make the system faster.
--
Tom Brinkman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Galveston Bay
