On Tuesday 18 March 2003 20:29, David Krider uttered:
> 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.

The problem, is that each level of optimization you go up, your system becomes 
exponentially more unstable.  Ask any gentoo user, and they'll brag about how 
fast their system boots up.  Boots up?  I worry about that once a month or 
so, when kernel errata is released.  Gentoo users are usually a daily 
occurrence when dealing with top level optimizations.

The benefit does come when somebody like Red Hat does all the compiling for 
you.  They compile it, they test it, they ensure that it's going to work to 
the best of their abilities on your hardware.  

Go ahead, start recompiling arbitrary pieces of your OS, with the most opt 
flags you can find.  Then really find out how stable your system is.  Would 
you put it into production?  Would you like to be the admin responsible for 
the uptime and upkeep of that system?  I sure wouldn't.  I don't know many 
other people who do this for a living that would touch it with a 10' pole.

Of course, this is just my jilted opinion, having come from a background of 
being responsible for unstable Windows boxes, I rather enjoy the stability I 
find in Red Hat systems.  Even if I take a measly 5~10% performance hit, I'd 
rather not listen to the "My PC locked up again...." from each user.  One 
user, maybe not that bad.  Multiply that across a 300 person company.  Sound 
fun?

</rant>

-- 
Jesse Keating RHCE MCSE
http://geek.j2solutions.net
Mondo DevTeam (www.mondorescue.org)

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