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

[Marc Stürmer]

Am 14.03.2013 09:15, schrieb Dale:

> I was wondering.  Has anyone ever seen where a test as been done to
> compare the speed of Gentoo with other distros?  Maybe Gentoo compared
> to Redhat, Mandrake, Ubuntu and such?

Running Gentoo is not a choice about raw _speed_. I mean, even if you 
claim that your binaries are running 2-3% faster than e.g. on Debian, 
this is something really negligable on a production system.

I mean, you may gain a small percentage of running speed, but on the 
other hand you get the need to have a compiler installed on your system, 
which could be quite a security hole, and having binaries produced by 
yourself.

If you are not that lucky to have your own binary package building host 
for Gentoo that's something, that you don't want to have on heavy duty 
production systems, like e.g. database hosts. Compiler runs on such 
systems are a big nono to me.

So running Gentoo is about another thing - _choice_ and _flexibility_. 
It fits that hole quite nicely if you need package switches enabled most 
binary based distributions don't have enabled. Otherwise running those 
distributions is the way to go.

Of course, if you like to tinker with your system to shape it the way 
you like it, Gentoo is a good choice.