On Sunday 19 December 2004 2:58 am, Joe Cooper wrote: [snip] > But not by much. I tried out the Intel compiler a couple of years ago, > with barely measurable (statistically insignificant) results. And > while I'm sure the Intel compiler has improved in those two years, GCC > probably has also. And given that the difference between a build with > no optimization and a build with high optimization is also quite small, > I don't foresee any compiler improvement being capable of significantly > altering Squid's performance.
When you've got some free time you might want to try benchmarking again, with current compiler versions. The Intel compiler (currently v8.1, Linux version free for non-commerial use) does a pretty good job of auto-parallizing single-threaded code. GCC is improving, but they still lag Intel in Pentium4 code generation, sometime greatly. I've been building Squid with ICC for years (on RedHat/Fedora systems), and see no downside to it. That is, the use of Intel's compiler/linker doesn't seem to reduce Squid stability vs. the GCC development tools. I agree that I/O is generally the bottleneck for Squid, but if you can get reduced CPU utilization for "free", why not?
