> > Does anyone disagree with Brian White ? If not I'll change the > > guidelines back to recommending -O2. > > I don't disagree with Brian but am not sure he's adequately proven his > point. He's only told us about what he found when compiling afio. > > Wouldn't it be wise to compare -O2 to -O3 on several (larger) packages > before the guidelines are modified?
I think function inlining is something that should be done only for performance-critical applications. The average debian package doesn't fit into that category. If you -O3 everything, you'll get bigger executables, you'll need more memory to run them in, and you'll need bigger hard drives to store them on. I wouldn't be surprised at all if they actually ran *slower* because more memory was being eaten up by useless inlining. People with 4MB and 8MB machines have the most to lose here. Let's save -O3 for packages that can benefit from it, like X servers and math applications. Jeff
