On Thu, 4 Mar 2004, Scott Venier wrote:
Charles R. Anderson said:
On Wed, Mar 03, 2004 at 07:03:49PM -0500, Ryan Caron wrote:
Gentoo since its so customizable, and the fact that everything is compiled from the source code speeds up the computer a fair amount.
Placebo affect most likely.
Thank you thank you thank you.
I'm so sick of the gentoo weenies claiming that.
As a "Gentoo Weenie" (Don't worry, no real offense taken), I'd like to comment on this. Yes, Gentoo does compile packages optimized for the CPU. I'm sure this does speed up packages, although probably not as much as a lot of Gentoo users seem to think. What people fail to take into consideration is the other available optimizations. When packages are compiled for most major distributions need to compile any and all available options that the distribution will support for any particular set of users. For a quick example: Evolution. Here are the available options you can enable/disable in Evolution for Gentoo: crypt doc ipv6 kde kerberos ldap mozilla pda spell ssl Redhat would need to compile support for all of these things into Evolution if any of their customers are going to use the feature. Each of these options add more memory requirements to evolution at the very least. Certain options may also increase the amount of cpu time used by the process as well. Other packages have even more options. Added together you can certainly save quite a bit of system resources on a heavily utilized system. Changes to the kernel itself and glibc can also give you savings or performance increases. (Yes, you can compile a custom kernel for other distros). Enabling nptl for glibc can give you a big speed increase if you're not using any programs that break with it. -- Greg