[ltp] Re: Preferred distro for Thinkpads?

[Daniel Pittman]

"Charles E. \"Rick\" Taylor, IV" <tomalek@mindspring.com> writes:

> On Tue, 2005-08-16 at 10:57 +1000, Daniel Pittman wrote:
>
>> Have you actually /measured/ a performance difference between Gentoo
>> packages and packages compiled on Debian, Fedora, etc, or do you simply
>> assume that they are faster?
>
> Fedora's packages are optimized for i686 these days - and most of these
> can be recompiled using whatever optimizations you like by rebuilding
> the source RPM.  Controlling which parts of a package get built may be
> much easier with Gentoo, though it's certainly not impossible with
> Fedora.

Uh-huh.  Also, Debian and most other distributions ship an i686+ version
of libc as well as the standard one, which enables things like the
vsyscall page.

In real life, when you actually measure things, these two things make a
difference.  For almost anything else, you can't tell the difference
between a 386, 686, P3 or P4 optimized bit of code.

Things where you /can/ tell the difference, like video compression
tools, almost never rely on the compiler to achieve the results, simply
because the compiler is *not* sufficiently smart yet.


Besides, how many hours of CPU time do you have to save on running your
optimized code before you make up for the time wasted compiling it all? ;)

          Daniel