I'll throw my oar in with Jeff on this one.. (as another FOSS contributer)
using Gentoo or LFS (scary thought) for a production Linux server is probably the dumbest thing you'll ever do involving Linux... the maintenance nightmare alone... gcc optimisation levels don't make a massive difference from a lot of real-world POVs, I'd like to see some useful real benchmarks but it still wouldn't be worth the hassle of a re-building everything from source just to get that small improvement.. it would probably have to be worth 10-15% speed to make it worth the hassle.. you know you can also re-build RH and Debian with higher optimisations you could in theory get all the RH SRC RPM and --rebuild them with higher opts on .. I don't even re-compile my kernel nowadays unless there is something seriously wrong with it, my standard desktop PC at work runs RH standard kernel, my laptop sometimes gets pre-release kernels but that's because I like ACPI on it... I'm not saying Gentoo et al don't have a place in the world, they do but that place is not running anything at a production/maintainable level, it's more a desktop for people with too much computing power and time on their hands or for someone who wants to learn how Linux distros work..... I think one point that Jeff may be thinking of saying (he may be yet too polite :-), is that you are wasting time that would be better spent doing something else with, install RH or Debian and use it for stuff, rather than waiting for Gentoo to re-build itself... Dave. On Tue, 5 Aug 2003, Jeff Waugh wrote: > <quote who="[EMAIL PROTECTED]"> > > > If I am going it install a high load email server, every little speed > > optimisation counts. > > This is false. Hardware and operating systems are cheap. Maintenance is > expensive. If you're going to install a high load email, every little > *maintenance* optimisation helps, and in that realm, Gentoo is just about > the worst possible choice you could make (the worst would be LFS homebrew > shenanigans, but I wouldn't expect anyone setting up a production mail > server to be quite that insane). > > If you need to handle more load, throw another cpu, more ram or another box > at the problem. Using a built-from-source distribution and microscopic code > level optimisations - which will have a nanoscopic effect on a relatively > large-grain non-computing intensive task such as mail serving - is not a > credible solution. > > - Jeff > > -- David Airlie, Software Engineer http://www.skynet.ie/~airlied / [EMAIL PROTECTED] pam_smb / Linux DECstation / Linux VAX / ILUG person -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
