Re: [gentoo-user] content of /usr/portage/distfile

["Richard Fish" <bigfish@asmallpond.org>]

On 5/24/06, Alex <sohalt@gmail.com> wrote:
>  > Using  CFLAGS="-Os" or  CFLAGS="-O2" is much more effective on
>  > a desktop system and can shave off more than 30% of the size. This is
>  > because larger binaries (like the HUGE ones produced by -O3)
>  > take longer to load, and occupy more RAM.
>
> Is that always true? I mean, I'm not loading and unloading applications
> the whole time. Additionally I've enough RAM for all applications I use
> and so I can't imagine that (on my computer with my use) applications,
> which are slower and smaller, can be faster than applications which are
> bigger and faster.

It depends entirely on the application and processor. Compared to -O2,
somethings are faster with -Os and some things are slower.  Same with
-O3.  It can even depend upon the options given to an app, for example
bzip2 -9 will be faster with one level of optimization than with
another, while bzip2 -1 can give the complete opposite results.

I chose -Os for my system, but only after testing the things that I
care most about (compression, dm-crypt encryption, some media
encoding) to see what was best overall.  But even that was a
comprimise, and the real deciding factor was that it took a lot less
time to compile with -Os compared to -O3.

-Richard

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