[Ilugc] Debian installation

From: sridharinfinity@xxxxxxxxx (Sridhar R)
Date: Sat, 29 May 2004 08:15:14 -0700 (PDT)

Raja Subramanian said:

Hi,

Sridhar R wrote:

But the packages are compiled with i386
optimizations. Why should I go for old compiler
optimizations when I have modern hardware.

Gentoo[1]

excels in this aspect.

This is a regular topic on most debian lists.

Somebody even got the

auto builder working and started compiling the

entire debian archive

with 686 optimizations.

BTW, don't forget that there are optimization
options like `pentium4`.

Its silly to have your entire system optimized for

your CPU. How much

faster is a 686 optimized version of cp/ls?

Consider the logistics

involved here - additional load on package mirrors,

distributing bug

fixes, etc and ask yourself if its worth the effort.

IMO, Debian has made a good decision by choosing

compatibility over

performance.

Gentoo is all about *user's* choice. A decision is
not always a perfect decision (atleast for someone).
For me Gentoo (compiled for `pentium4`) has
significant speed improvements over slackware
(compiled for i486). That's a proof.

This is digressing, but someone wanted benchmarks so

I'll mention my

past adventures with CPU optimization. Some years

ago, I compiled gzip

with optimizations and tried to benchmark it. I had

to compress several

GB of data daily and would benefit from a fast gzip

binary.

I used these gzip binaries for testing on a P3 and

an AMD k7 -

o default debian gzip compiled for vanilla i386
o default redhat/mandrake binaries optimized for

686

o rolled several gzip binaries from src with

various optimization

    flags (used gcc 2.95)

Fair trials were conducted with -
  o a 100MB file created from /dev/zero
  o a 100MB file created from /dev/random

The disappointing result was that all gzip binaries

clocked similar

run times. CPU optimization was not worth the

effort in this case.

However, the biggest benefit was when I created an

unoptimized static

gzip binary, which was ~30% faster than everything

else.

Obvious. But did you try recompiling glibc, ...

Go figure!

- Raja

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=====
---
Sridhar R
WWW: http://cs.annauniv.edu/~rsridhar



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[Ilugc] Debian installation

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