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

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On 14/03/2013 14:12, Pandu Poluan wrote:
> 
> On Mar 14, 2013 4:14 PM, "William Kenworthy" <billk@iinet.net.au
> <mailto:billk@iinet.net.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.



-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com