Gentoo Linux faster app-load than (Mandrake|Fedora)

[Mark Mielke]

On Thu, Oct 09, 2003 at 10:55:39AM -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-10-09 at 10:41, Mark Mielke wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 09, 2003 at 10:08:30AM -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> > > What is somewhat amusing about the test is that the one major 
> > > advantage of the Gentoo approach is that you *could* create two
> > > otherwise identical systems except for compiler flags quite easily,
> > > something that would be fairly hard with more conventional 
> > > systems.
> > > But the tester hasn't (as far as I can see) done this, and just
> > > jumps to the conclusion that compiler flags are responsible for the
> > > major speed differences.
> > This perspective is a little cynical. The tester was quite clear that
> > the results *can* be disputed. It goes further to point out that Mandrake
> > may be running more services (i.e. the free RAM is not equivalent), and
> > it also points to the kernel patch set (i.e. not just the compiler flags).
> ...
> I think you completely missed the point of my email; what my mail
> was saying was:

I apologize if I read you wrong. I will point out, though, that your
concluding paragraph made an incorrect conclusion. You seem to believe
that the tester believes that compiler flags made all the difference.
I do not read the article referred to the same way that you do.

>  - Gentoo would be a great platform for verifying that one way or 
>    the other, so it would be great if those tests were extended
>    to do an apples-versus-apples comparison with only compiler
>    flags changed.

The purpose of the test wasn't to compare GCC optimizer settings. It was
to compare Gentoo to Mandrake. Unless I am wrong, the reason Mandrake was
chosen, is because Mandrake purports to be GCC optimized for the
Pentium instruction set as well... I'm not sure what you would gain from
the test that you couldn't gain from recompiling a few RedHat packages with
GCC optimizer settings finely tuned.

Cheers,
mark

-- 
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