On Tue, 2003-03-18 at 22:01, Jens Knutson wrote: > On Tue, 2003-03-18 at 20:46, HoytDuff wrote: > > I really don't want to recompile everything, so if I wanted to spend the > > minimal amount of time recompiling for, say, Athlon optimisations, I would > > want to recompile the kernel (and maybe gcc so it would compile other apps > > faster), glibc, X11, and what next? The GNOME and KDE libs (and QT)? > > Multimedia apps? At what point do I get diminishing returns? > > I"m guessing the only things worth bothering with are the kernel, glibc, > and any media codecs... beyond that, I'd guess you'd get nothing really > noticeable. > > Gentoo users would probably argue with this. I'd ask them to show > numbers...
Ok. Here we go. I posted awhile back about my experience flirting with Gentoo. I found that it was noticeably faster and more responsive. Take it for what it's worth, but I think that most of us hard-core geeks, who have seen years and years of performance upgrades and have some basic feel for what our hardware dollars are providing, know the difference between a 2%, a 10%, and a 20% difference in speed. I'd say that the overall feel of the Gentoo installation was 10-15% "snappier" than the same system running RH 7.3. (I'm a KDE user, just for reference.) However, the idea that significant gains could be realized by recompiling the RPM's was poo-poo'ed my Mike Harris, who claimed his years of experience led him to conclude that this just wasn't going to be the case. I asked if perhaps he formed those opinions back in the days before Athlons and P4's, but I didn't get a response. There's no doubt in my mind that there are indeed fundamental improvements to be gained through compiling 1) for your architecture, and 2) with all the optimizations you can get. Just compiling with `-march=Athlon' isn't going to cut it. There are several more flags that a wound-out Gentoo user would use. If you can pass those to RPM, I don't know how, but I'd love to find out. I tried recompiling Mozilla on my Phoebe box, as it was the most in need of help. I didn't notice any difference. I'm guessing that this is an all-or-nothing deal. Yeah, you can say that you'll only recompile the kernel, X, KDE, Gnome, and Mozilla, but then, that's most everything of importance on the box. Throw in glibc and gcc, and that's basically it. I liked Gentoo's speed. I liked Gentoo's "portage" system, which in my brief stint with both of these, blows Debian's apt system away. But I just can't get over the time involved. One of my workstations is a dual Athlon 1200 with 512 MB RAM. The other is a dual Athlon 1800 with 1 GB of RAM. Both with nice SCSI drives and Adaptec controllers. It takes about 3 days to get a usable system with one of these machines. (Even with -J3 as a make option to use both CPU's.) That's unacceptable to me. On top of that, if you suddenly find a need for something you haven't been using, you may find yourself recompiling EVERYthing on the whole machine to support it. Short story: there's a lesson to be learned from optimizing the entire system. The benefit will come when someone else pre-compiles it for you. dk -- Phoebe-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/phoebe-list
