On 14/03/2013 15:40, Mark David Dumlao wrote: > On 03/14/2013 09:28 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote: >> On 14/03/2013 14:12, Pandu Poluan wrote: >>> On Mar 14, 2013 4:14 PM, "William Kenworthy" <bi...@iinet.net.au >>> <mailto:bi...@iinet.net.au>> wrote: >>>> Did this few years back for an online magazine sponsored by a local >>>> linux sysadmin company who wanted to see the difference between generic >>>> debian and optimised (not necessarily gentoo, but thats what I used.) >>>> >>>> Difference in times was ~10% across the board for graphics manipulations >>>> (gimp scripts), spreadsheet tasks (gnumeric) and the like. >>>> >>>> The "kicker" - simple optimisations gained far, far more than generic >>>> compiler settings. e.g., initially, the gnumeric versions were slightly >>>> different, with some wild times across the tasks. Make em the same >>>> version (and cuedos to the gnumeric maintainer for jumping in and >>>> helping diagnose/fix the problem - newer version on gentoo was heaps >>>> slower :) and there was little difference. >>>> >>>> Shared libs like glibc didnt make a huge difference, but being smart >>>> about how/what a "particular" task was handled gained more. If a debian >>>> app was compiled with similar options as to gentoo, little difference >>>> between them in performance which considering shared libs etc wasn't >>>> what I expected. >>>> >>>> The intel compilers are/were said to be a lot better than gcc, not sure >>>> if the gap is still there (supposedly 20% better again) >>>> >>>> Its how long is a piece of string kind of question if considered OS >>>> wide, but pick a narrow task and optimise away with smart programmers >>>> and you will do well on almost anything. >>>> >>>> Big advantage of gentoo - configurability, version control (what version >>>> is installed and changing it at short notice) and general flexibility. >>>> >>> This. >>> >>> Why I prefer Gentoo over other distros: Full control. >>> >>> I mean, I can (and do) leverage "-march=native". And I certainly have an >>> overly long USE flags... but it's the sheet satisfaction of knowing that >>> my system is MY system that made me stick with Gentoo... >>> >>> It's eminently satisfying -- a geekgasm, if you will -- to know that >>> one's kernel is lean and customized, all the toolchains have been tuned, >>> and there are no useless things being installed... >>> >>> In regards to performance, the benefits might not be groundbreaking, but >>> it's there, and when your server is being relentlessly hammered by >>> requests, Gentoo seems to have additional breathing space where other >>> distros choke... >> >> Gentoo excels as a -dev system where your devs need to test things in >> different environments. >> >> A classic case is different pythons. We have many Centos 4 machines in >> production that run python-2.4, the developers naturally run something >> bleeding edge like 2.7 or 3.3 on their laptops. >> >> Many many times they need to know if their bespoke code runs properly on >> Centos, or PyPy or whatever other valid environment difference could >> happen in the real world. >> >> Tweak USE, tweak the masking and let emerge world do it's thing. Now the >> dev can do valid tests. If the dev machines are VMs, snapshot them just >> before starting this and you have the best possible solution for my money. >> >> Or, try remove LDAP, NIS and PAM support for auth from a RHEL machine to >> test if it works without those things in place. >> RHEL? Impossible. >> Gentoo? Trivially easy. > "Trivially easy", of course, means an emerge -euDNtv world && emerge > -ctv && revdep-rebuild -i && revdep-rebuild ... ehehehe > > I dunno, it might actually be easier to setup the said distros in a VM. > And if those configurations don't work, you shouldn't have to support > them, eh? ;) >
Well, devs tend to ask questions like "would this thing X work in practice? or do I have to munge my code?" They want to know if shipped code supports something. And, I don't get to say "I'm sorry, I cannot support Centos 4 on this" Business has a stock answer "Well, find a way to make it work." Flexibility is the key. At least with "emerge -euDNtv world && emerge -ctv && revdep-rebuild -i && revdep-rebuild" I can walk away and come back in three hours, look at logs and tell them to test. Plus I don't have to re-install their customer code everyt time from scratch (said code *never*, of course, coming with anything resembling a MakeFile) -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
