Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo speed comparison to other distros

[Alan McKinnon]

On 14/03/2013 15:40, Mark David Dumlao wrote:
> On 03/14/2013 09:28 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote:
>> On 14/03/2013 14:12, Pandu Poluan wrote:
>>> On Mar 14, 2013 4:14 PM, "William Kenworthy" <billk@×××××××××.au
>>> <mailto:billk@×××××××××.au>> wrote:
>>>> Did this few years back for an online magazine sponsored by a local
>>>> linux sysadmin company who wanted to see the difference between generic
>>>> debian and optimised (not necessarily gentoo, but thats what I used.)
>>>>
>>>> Difference in times was ~10% across the board for graphics manipulations
>>>> (gimp scripts), spreadsheet tasks (gnumeric) and the like.
>>>>
>>>> The "kicker" - simple optimisations gained far, far more than generic
>>>> compiler settings.  e.g., initially, the gnumeric versions were slightly
>>>> different, with some wild times across the tasks.  Make em the same
>>>> version (and cuedos to the gnumeric maintainer for jumping in and
>>>> helping diagnose/fix the problem - newer version on gentoo was heaps
>>>> slower :) and there was little difference.
>>>>
>>>> Shared libs like glibc didnt make a huge difference, but being smart
>>>> about how/what a "particular" task was handled gained more.  If a debian
>>>> app was compiled with similar options as to gentoo, little difference
>>>> between them in performance which considering shared libs etc wasn't
>>>> what I expected.
>>>>
>>>> The intel compilers are/were said to be a lot better than gcc, not sure
>>>> if the gap is still there (supposedly 20% better again)
>>>>
>>>> Its how long is a piece of string kind of question if considered OS
>>>> wide, but pick a narrow task and optimise away with smart programmers
>>>> and you will do well on almost anything.
>>>>
>>>> Big advantage of gentoo - configurability, version control (what version
>>>> is installed and changing it at short notice) and general flexibility.
>>>>
>>> This.
>>>
>>> Why I prefer Gentoo over other distros: Full control.
>>>
>>> I mean, I can (and do) leverage "-march=native". And I certainly have an
>>> overly long USE flags... but it's the sheet satisfaction of knowing that
>>> my system is MY system that made me stick with Gentoo...
>>>
>>> It's eminently satisfying -- a geekgasm, if you will -- to know that
>>> one's kernel is lean and customized, all the toolchains have been tuned,
>>> and there are no useless things being installed...
>>>
>>> In regards to performance, the benefits might not be groundbreaking, but
>>> it's there, and when your server is being relentlessly hammered by
>>> requests, Gentoo seems to have additional breathing space where other
>>> distros choke...
>>
>> Gentoo excels as a -dev system where your devs need to test things in
>> different environments.
>>
>> A classic case is different pythons. We have many Centos 4 machines in
>> production that run python-2.4, the developers naturally run something
>> bleeding edge like 2.7 or 3.3 on their laptops.
>>
>> Many many times they need to know if their bespoke code runs properly on
>> Centos, or PyPy or whatever other valid environment difference could
>> happen in the real world.
>>
>> Tweak USE, tweak the masking and let emerge world do it's thing. Now the
>> dev can do valid tests. If the dev machines are VMs, snapshot them just
>> before starting this and you have the best possible solution for my money.
>>
>> Or, try remove LDAP, NIS and PAM support for auth from a RHEL machine to
>> test if it works without those things in place.
>> RHEL? Impossible.
>> Gentoo? Trivially easy.
> "Trivially easy", of course, means an emerge -euDNtv world && emerge
> -ctv && revdep-rebuild -i && revdep-rebuild ... ehehehe
>
> I dunno, it might actually be easier to setup the said distros in a VM.
> And if those configurations don't work, you shouldn't have to support
> them, eh? ;)
>


Well, devs tend to ask questions like "would this thing X work in
practice? or do I have to munge my code?"

They want to know if shipped code supports something. And, I don't get
to say "I'm sorry, I cannot support Centos 4 on this"

Business has a stock answer "Well, find a way to make it work."

Flexibility is the key. At least with

"emerge -euDNtv world && emerge -ctv && revdep-rebuild -i && revdep-rebuild"

I can walk away and come back in three hours, look at logs and tell them
to test. Plus I don't have to re-install their customer code everyt time
from scratch (said code *never*, of course, coming with anything
resembling a MakeFile)



-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com