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

["Marcus D. Hanwell" <linux@cryos.net>]

Klavs Klavsen wrote:

>Chris Gianelloni said:
>  
>
>> While I agree that there can be great performance increases, I believe
>>
>>that there is a definite trade-off between performance and
>>manageability.  This would be wholly unmanageable without an army of
>>testers working around the clock until Gentoo ceased to be... *grin*
>>
>>    
>>
>The idea would ofcourse be that, only the "obvious" programs would be
>tested - but if profiling were implemented/possible with gcc-3.5 and
>portage easily - I'm  fairly certain that would be of more value (would
>that also help select the right CFLAGS ?)
>
>  
>
I would tend to agree here - if GCC 3.5 has features that can 
automatically profile applications and use the correct optimisations 
then there would be little point in spending the time doing this by hand 
(even if using some automated test scripts).

I personally saw it being of use for larger applications in the tree, 
such as Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, PHP, Postfix, bincimap, Courier, KDE, 
GNOME, GCC, GlibC etc. It would certainly be an impossible task to 
perform this work on all of the tree for all archs :)

I personally use amd64 platform with fairly modest CFLAGS="-march=k8 -O2 
-pipe" at the moment - going for best all round performance with 
stability. There are things such as fftw where I do try to optimise if 
possible, and I would be interested in a 10% speed gain on the fftw 
library for a 5 hour simulation run!

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