Is Gentoo that fast?

Yossarian · Posted: Fri Dec 05, 2003 3:29 am Post subject: Is Gentoo that fast?

I was at fry's today and noticed that they had a box set up with Suse 8.2 and an Athlon 64. I wanted to fool around with it so after getting the guy to enter the login pass I was off. I'll say I was disappointed with the performance. I kept thinking that for a system with a 2ghz Athlon 64 and 500 megs of ram it felt awfully slow. Dragging windows around was very jumpy and Oo took forever to open. I didn't fool around too much on it but those were my first impressions. I don't know what it was but this system felt slower than my 1.4ghz athlon t-bird with 256megs of ram. I don't know if it's just my gentoo install is a good bit faster than Suse or what. I'm using a 2.4 kernel, but I have preemption and low-latency scheduling activated. I'm thinking that must have a little to do with it.
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Beekster · Apprentice Joined: 26 Nov 2002 Posts: 268 Location: Sydney

I think the Linux skills (or lack thereof) of guy that built it would be quite relevant here. Choppy window dragging would have me guess that drivers for whatever video card or chipset it's using have not been set up.

As for Oo, who knows? The system could have a mix of 32 and 64 bit software on it for all we know. If the chipset support isn't properly configured, the IDE access might not have DMA enabled. The possibilities are almost endless.

hook · Posted: Fri Dec 05, 2003 3:51 am Post subject:

that,
plus removing the bloat in your kernel (since it's not precompiled)
plus a small contribution of the -O flags
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DarrenM · Posted: Fri Dec 05, 2003 4:57 am Post subject:

Could have been a process in the background chewing processor time or something like dma not being enabled. There shouldn't be much, if any, noticable performance differences between distributions on a fast machine.

Could have had a crappy video card too.

Cerement · Guru Joined: 14 Jun 2003 Posts: 404

For Gentoo, I think it comes down to an accumulation of small factors, each one minor on their own, but combined with others, create an overall impress of speed and responsiveness.

gentoo-sources kernel -- The gentoo-sources package contains specially tuned performance kernel patches designed to optimize tasks such as compiling while listening to music and browsing the web.

preemptible kernel and low-latency scheduling enabled -- greater desktop responsiveness

DMA enabled -- better hard disk and CD-ROM performance

gcc compiler flags -- choosing between -O0, -O1, -O2, -O3, -Os plus a myriad of little fine tweaks allowing you to create code that takes the best advantage of your particular processor and its abilities

When you compare that against binary Linux distros aimed at the masses (minimal kernel tuning (vanilla-sources), no preemptible or lowlatency, minimal DMA, and binaries compiled for i386 or i486 processors), you can really begin to see the differences ...

jcmorris · Apprentice Joined: 11 Jun 2003 Posts: 174

IIRC, SuSE 8.2 is 32-bit only. In addition, SuSE is not the most optimized system, and has always run slowly for me. An Athlon 64 running Gentoo would definitely outpace SuSE, and running 64-bit Gentoo would yield and incredible performance increase.

jcm
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bleakcabal · Posted: Fri Dec 05, 2003 11:53 pm Post subject:

Is Gentoo that fast ?

No.

It's not that fast but it's still fast enough, id say about this fast.

( Just joking, I couldn't resist, well I tried to resist to urge to post this for a whole day but it was getting at me )

hook · Posted: Mon Dec 08, 2003 7:09 am Post subject:

another thing about the -O flags: don't get too optimistic that the biggest -O number gives the best (fastest) code ...there're cases (athlon in my case) which work faster with -O2 flag then with -O3 ...also there's the -Os flag, which i don't really remember what it stands for.
i think there's a -O flag doc somewhere int the gentoo docs. - take a look

it's probably not THAT much faster by default, but IF you know how to optimise it, gentoo gives you the most space and possibilities to do so.
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Cerement · Guru Joined: 14 Jun 2003 Posts: 404

-O1, -O2, and -O3 in basic form are supposed to be straight speed optimizations, each one adding in a couple of factors not available in earlier versions

-Os is optimize for size -- according to the gcc docs, it's mostly -O2 optimizations but when there's a tradeoff between space and size, it opts for size

-Os has started to become popular for desktop Gentoo installs -- the smaller the file is, the less time it takes to read from disk, the less time it takes to load into memory -- less memory it uses, the less need of using swap space, the less swapping happens ...

hook · Posted: Mon Dec 08, 2003 10:49 am Post subject:

philwozza · n00b Joined: 28 Nov 2003 Posts: 13

IMHO SUSE is about as fast as an asmatic ant carrying a large case with suse 8.2 and all its manualls on its back.... enough said :lol:

speedster · Posted: Tue Dec 09, 2003 2:10 am Post subject: suse vs. gentoo

SUSE is mainly for those who want a dumbed-down Linux, similar to Mandrake. Easy to set up (maybe takes 20 minutes), easy to use, but quite a bit slower. I've used both for several years before taking the "Gentoo leap of faith" and will never go back! I have learned way more using Gentoo and my system is about 20-30% faster, it seems.

All in all, Gentoo is the way to go.
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beowulf · Apprentice Joined: 07 Apr 2003 Posts: 225

if you can't trust a guy named speedster on the subject of speed, who can ya trust

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trajedi · n00b Joined: 16 Jul 2003 Posts: 73 Location: Dallas

speedster · Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2003 11:16 pm Post subject:

okay, so I can't think up any cool screenname! Oh well, guess I'll survive!

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Gentoo is highly addictive....