Re: [gentoo-dev] Do we want optimal performance?

[Klavs Klavsen]

Marcus D. Hanwell said:
> Alin Nastac wrote:
[SNIP]
> People could still have the choice to set whatever blanket optimisations
> they want, or even override the default C_FLAGS and CXXFLAGS as in
> package.use etc. Wouldn't this allow us to find optimal CFLAGS etc for a
> subset of the packages in Gentoo, and set default CFLAGS which could
> then be overridden?
>
exactly.

> I for one would be in favour of this. It could be a gradual process, may
> be added to profiles for different archs. With cascading profiles you
> could choose the profile with package specific optimisation, or a more
> generic profile with no package specific optimisations.
>
> Not a Gentoo dev, but I for one think this is a great idea. I have seen
> this mentioned before, and I do believe that for certain packages this
> would be most beneficial. For other packages there may never be much
> point.
>
Glad I'm not the only one then :)

I do realise there wouldn't be much point in doing this flag-optimization
for every package - but I'm sure everybody could benefit greatly from this
for servers, with MySQL, PostgreSQL, apache etc. etc. Would be nice with
if this resulted in a set of optimal CFLAGS (as fast as possible, without
stability problems) and perhaps some performance CFLAGS (with perhaps some
stability problems) for these packages (for each CPU-type) - so people
know what they are doing.

It would in esssense be a record of "automated performance testing
numbers" with "unstable CFLAGS added, if not detected with automated
performance testing, then added via bugzilla.

IMHO a very good start would be with tests for the major serverpackages
(as they are the easiest to do test-suites fore - and most likely we can
already find test-suites for these) and then go from there.
To most, they won't care if bzip2 is a little slower - but they would
care, if their LAMP setup was quicker for the same buck :)

-- 
Regards,
Klavs Klavsen, GSEC - kl@××××.dk - http://www.vsen.dk
PGP: 7E063C62/2873 188C 968E 600D D8F8  B8DA 3D3A 0B79 7E06 3C62

"Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
  --Henry Spencer


--
gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list