Custom Kernels

[Wayne Leutwyler]

On Wednesday 06 October 2004 10:59 am, Scot L. Harris wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-10-06 at 10:36, Wayne Leutwyler wrote:
> > Quick question.
> >
> > Would I see any performance benefits from building my own custom kernel?
> > One of the things I see is that the stock kernel is set for a Pentium II,
> > but since this machine I am using is a Pentium III, I was wondering if
> > that would give me any benefit.  Also I try on turn off things I know I
> > wont need on this PC.
>
> Any kind of performance tuning should start with analyzing what you are
> using the machine for and spending the time to identify where most of
> your resources are being spent.
>
> Simply jumping in and frobbing the knobs is generally not good
> practice.  In most cases it will adversely affect your systems
> performance instead of improving it.
>
> And the kernel is probably the last item to work when optimizing a
> system.  Again it really depends on what it is you are trying to improve
> performance of.  For a heavy duty database server you will probably get
> more benefit by tweaking the queries or setting up proper keys.  For a
> network application you may want to adjust window size or some of the
> other network parameters.  If a particular application is slow doing
> certain calculations it may need to be re-written using a different
> algorithm.  If you are reading and writing huge files you might need to
> use a different type of file system that optimizes that kind of function
> or use higher speed disk drives.
>
> So until you really analyze what specific performance criteria you are
> trying to improve messing with the kernel is a blind alley at best and
> at worst you could decrease performance of most things on your system.
>
> --
> Scot L. Harris
> webid at cfl.rr.com
>
> The absence of labels [in ECL] is probably a good thing.
> 		-- T. Cheatham

Thanks Scot these are all good points. There is no real machine I am doing 
this on, its more of something I was wondering. 

Maybe I did not ask my question correctly.

Are there any benefits from building a custom kernel, aside from a smaller 
kernel and smaller modules foot print.

-- 
Wayne Leutwyler, RHCT
Sys Admin / DBA
Columbus, OH. USA