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