RPM Builds and System Optimization

[Nifty Hat Mitch]

On Thu, Aug 26, 2004 at 12:26:15PM -0400, David Cary Hart wrote:

> Most of the Fedora RPMS are provided as i386. These can easily be
> recompiled as:
> 
> rpmbuild --target i686 --rebuild package.src.rpm
> 
> a. Is it worth it? In other words, is there really a performance gain in
> packages like - say - KDE?
> 
> b. Assuming that I installed the RPM sources and built from the spec
> file, as long as I am at it, could I also benefit by changing some of
> the FLAGS?
> 
> 	For example:
> 		CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
> 		CFLAGS="-march=pentium4 -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"

You will only know for sure if you try it.

However I look at the activity on my system and it is mostly
idle or when sluggish disk I/O bound.  This tells me that 
CPU specific optimizations are not critical for my use.

In my opinion the most productive place for code optimizations is
library functions not common application space.

A productive operational trick that feels like an optimization is a
little readahead script that keeps my commonly used bits (applications
and libraries) in DRAM.  See /etc/init.d/readahead


-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
	Just say no to 74LS73 in 2004