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

[Allan Gottlieb <gottlieb@nyu.edu>]

At Wed, 24 May 2006 20:52:21 +0000 Alex <sohalt@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> znx wrote:
>> http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Free_up_disk_space_in_Gentoo
>
>  > 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.

Often the bigger problem with large binaries is that their working
sets exceeds the sizes of the L1 and (possibly) L2 caches.  So, you
may well be right that your gigabytes of RAM greatly reduce disk
access to load and demand page applications, you may still get a
slowdown due to cache misses.  Central memory, which is the fast &
small storage when considering demand paging, is the large but slow
storage when considering caching.

allan

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