Sluggish Mandrake WAS RE: [PLUG] Fedora change...

Jason Van Cleve jason at vancleve.com
Thu Nov 13 17:11:01 UTC 2003


Quoth Elliott Mitchell, on Thu, 13 Nov 2003 12:56:15 -0800 (PST):

> You get speedy operation if you know what you're doing. There were
> some tests done using various installations of Linux. *ALL* of the
> distributions with binaries optimized for Pentium outperformed Gentoo.
> In some cases Debian, which still builds for i80386, outperformed
> Gentoo's custom builds.

Well, that's just remarkable.  Why would 386-optimized software outperform that compiled for, say, a pentium4 right on it's host machine?  It's right counterintuitive. . . .  Do those tests use the same kernel?

> The guess was that though the other distributions weren't specially
> optimized, they still had people who knew more about the packages and
> could simply choose the build options better.

So when you say "if you know what you're doing", you really mean, "if you know how to strip down your system and your binaries were built well".  Then again, gentoo builds include a default set of options (which can be tweaked by users as needed but aren't usually).  Does this imply those default options are not well chosen for performance?  Is it just a matter of gentoo's developers not yet knowing all the build tricks?

I should like to understand this.

> In the general case doing your own build of programs/packages is
> silly. The cost in time and electricity needed is quite large, and
> mostly for not very large gains.

Especially if it results in slower binaries!  On the other hand, being able to build in new patches easily is a nice way for us modem users to keep up to date.  There seem to be only a few distros which really facilitate that.  (But that was my second point.)

--Jason




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