On Tue, 10 Sep 2002 22:39:38 +0100 Adam Bower abower@thebowery.co.uk wrote:
On Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 10:31:31PM +0100, Craig wrote:
On Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 10:07:41PM +0100, Adam Bower wrote:
I tried one of the earlier releases and didn't get the experience it was suggested i would, i left it overnight compiling and got back the next day to find it had really screwed up somewhere in the build process so I was understandably a bit pissed off :)
The early releases were a bit awkward but weren't most distros were like this in their early stages?
Thats true, just I did think it took the piss as their publicity at the time promised lots more than they actually gave me though. What I may do when I find some spare time is do an install of Debian and make it nice and lovely for this box and then benchmark it, then do the same for Redhat, Gentoo Mandrake to see what the benefits in performance of each are as I am especially interested to see if the alleged optimisations actually make any difference with Gentoo as I have heard some people say that the real world benefits will be minimal possibly less than 1 or 2% and in some cases worse than just compiling for 386.
I suspect that for the majority of packages it will make a small difference but maybe not enough to worry about. Where I expect it will make a worthwhile difference is in things which a very CPU intensive in the first place. Examples are cryptography and audio and video coding applications. Some of these will benefit even more because they include hand coded and optimised assembler for certain processor types.
Steve.