> Quite frankly, I'd be surprised if a Gentoo server was significantly
> faster than a CentOS 5 (RHEL 5 clone) server on a high-intensity
> server workload. But I have tried a lot of distros for scientific
> workstations, and Gentoo does seem to have an advantage there.

I would have to agree. The performance gains in Gentoo tend to (In the
Real World(tm) ) come from not having a bunch of crap instaled an
running that hogs memory rather than from using a particular set of
optimizing flags. Further, real-word servers ten to be built with some
performance margin in order to handle load spikes, so a few percent
here and there wouldn't really be measurable, assuming you compare to a
system that isn't bloated. 

Further,this list has averaged at about one post per month since around
2003 when I joined, so don't expect to gett too many replies from here.

--DA