[plug] Optimized Distro

[Bill Kenworthy]

It can make quite a difference on certain applications, but there are
also traps.  It seems some (all?) celerons can actually perform worse
(much!) using -O3 optimisation flags because the small cache cant handle
the increased code.  However, when I went from Mandrake to Gentoo on a
P3, and then on an athlon, the results were very satisfyingly faster. 
Probably not so noticable on a desktop, but for some scientific
applications was a real gain.

BillK

On Tue, 2003-07-15 at 12:59, Leon Brooks wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Jul 2003 11:53, Weirdo wrote:
> > I have just compiled my kernel, optimized for my Celeron 466 on a
> > Debian r0 system. I know that Debian packages are compiled so that
> > they will run on a 386 up. I like the Gentoo approach of compiling
> > every thing so that it is optimized.
> 
> IRL, this only buys you a few percent improvement for an enormous amount 
> of effort.
> 
> Mandrake's approach is to optimize for the basic Pentium, which buys you 
> most of those few percent across the board, then provide a (very) few 
> 686-optimised components (kernel-enterprise, GLIBC) which get you back 
> most of the change. They found that some optimised aplications ran 
> *slower* even on the advanced processors because some of the 
> optimisations are tradeoffs and the tradeoffs didn't always work.
> 
> I'd suggest that you take a similar approach, not taking an optimisation 
> unless it had a clear benefit, and only rebuilding applications that 
> are math-heavy (MP3 players, raytracers etc), a few key pieces like the 
> kernel and core libraries, and anything that constantly hogs CPU (artsd 
> and the like).
> 
> Cheers; Leon
-- 
Bill Kenworthy <billk at iinet.net.au>