On Fri, Aug 12, 2005 at 5:30 pm, in message <20050812053046.GA14401@suse.de>, meissner@suse.de wrote: On Thu, Aug 11, 2005 at 03:26:08PM - 0600, Andreas Girardet wrote: Have been running and testing 686 distros and have been running 586 ones and with all nice features i686 cpu's have mmx 3dnow and so on I would think that on a GUI level the increase is staggering. From a server perspective it is probably as you say.
First, we already compile with - march=i586 - mtune=i686 (instruction set i586, but schedule instructions for i686)
Also, just enabling - mtune=i686 - march=i686 will not magically add MMX or 3DNOW or SSE instructions to the code. (gcc 4.0 lacks the auto vectorizer that will be to some degree in 4.1.)
- fomit- frame- pointer might give the most speedup on x86, but lead to less debuggable programs.
In general the problem with "slowness" usually does not lie in the compiler options, but in the general algorithms used by the applications, memory usage etc.
Ciao, Marcus
Hi Marcus Thanks for the update. Yes you are right and maybe this is futile effort, since as you say we are already compiling it quite highly optimised. Good food for thought .... and thanks for some technical detail, which I was not aware. In general however I wonder why on the same system Yoper or Gentoo just feels that much faster than SuSE or certainly much faster than RedHat? It certainly is a very subjective "feeling" but one that is confirmed by many others. Also people switching to NLD from Windows within Novell notice the speedloss that comes with it. They say NLD is just that much slower than Windows. One of the reasons I decided to do Yoper in first place was to make a Desktop just as snappy as windows as it just is not the case on a normal setup. Maybe the Con Kolivas patches and prelinking speed things up enough to get by. Just wondering from experience with thousands of people's feedback, why if it is true what you say,many people claim that some distro's are faster than others? Maybe I should just bag this effort and concentrate on adding additional packages and debugging..... but I am not totally convinced yet ;) and I do miss that snappiness that I was used to for all those years I ran my own compiled Linux. Maybe you can shed some more technical detail as I do lack the knowledge to fully understand the issues. Am not a programmer after all.