How fast is gentoo?

tyreth · Posted: Mon May 27, 2002 6:40 am Post subject: How fast is gentoo?

I'll be using gentoo as soon as I get cable internet

I've read some reviews, but I want to hear from the average user who has come from another pre-compiled distribution like Mandrake or Redhat.

How fast is gentoo? What sort of a speed increase did you notice because of compiling from source?

sibn · n00b Joined: 15 May 2002 Posts: 36

for me, gentoo is about 1200Mhz, and gets about 2,390 bogomips.

Apart from that, faster than other dists? Certainly. In fact, I find myself running nautilus (largely because I can), on account of it's faster for me in gentoo than it ever was for redhat/slack/mdk.

On the other hand, KDE 3 is painfully slow, no matter how I compile it. I'm not willing to wait that long for anything that should be faster than that. Edit: slow in every way, actually. It takes hours to compile, and if I were to use it regularly, I would find myself wasting an hour or so every week- Wait 4 seconds for things like konqueror to start every 15 minutes or so... use the system for 8-12 hours a day... introduces about a 20 second loss every hour, so cut the middle and do 10 hours a day, and you get a 200 second loss every day. This means in the average week, I'd lose 1400 seconds (23 minutes!) to waiting for applications to start. Every three weeks, I would have lost another hour of productivity. in the real world, I'm much more active than this, and I demand more from my system. There is simply no way in hell that I could use kde 3.

As for other speed improvements... dunno. I find myself compiling so much stuff that I don't rightly think I could claim paying much attention to the actual time it takes to start and use an application. :lol:

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tyreth · Posted: Mon May 27, 2002 7:30 am Post subject:

Yeah, I agree that KDE is slow, at least from my experience of it in pre-compiled formats. Konqueror slow to load, etc. I presume it's faster in gentoo though, just still not fast enough.

One thing that was very fast for me in KDE3 was using konqueror as a file browser once it was open. Directory contents display almost instantly, whereas when I use nautilus 2-3 seconds maybe to load and display the directory contents. Have you experienced that? Does using nautilus from source in Gentoo mean it loads directory contents instantly?

MacMasta · Posted: Mon May 27, 2002 8:17 am Post subject: See previous things by me

I can get Gentoo to do some things faster than my debian box.
However, this is extremely remarkable, because the gentoo installation is running on vmware, on the debian box.
So, gentoo in a virtual machine is faster than debian native.
Ah-ha!

~Mac~

sibn · n00b Joined: 15 May 2002 Posts: 36

Shark · n00b Joined: 25 May 2002 Posts: 22

Hmm, how fast? Fast enough I would say..

You can feel the speed improvements in most of the things you do. I didn't even have to do any benchmarks to actually see that the 3D-performance of my TNT2 M64 had suddenly improved. I was able to see with my bare eye that the framerate was higher than before

Scandium · Posted: Mon May 27, 2002 9:18 am Post subject:

I've used Debian a long time and Debian compiles everything for i386 and Gentoo gave me a huge speed improvement especially in X (using -march=i686 -O3 -pipe)

tyreth · Posted: Mon May 27, 2002 9:31 am Post subject:

Sounds like everyone's getting a nice speed increase. I have an athlon 1.33ghz with a Geforce 2 MX.

Is speed much better with games using nVidia's binaries with quake3 binaries? One of you said you noticed a visible framerate increase.

yagami · Posted: Mon May 27, 2002 1:53 pm Post subject:

well , i compiled kde 3.0.1 with the kde performance tips and ..... kde is blazing fast ( relative to others of course)

i have an athlon 700 with 256 ram

konq. takes 1 , 2 second to startup ( depending if it is the first time or not )

the whole kde startup , is very very very fast ( less than 10 seconds, if not the first time ) ... its great , actually , much faster than nautilus

although ... love those svg icons in nautilus

Shark · n00b Joined: 25 May 2002 Posts: 22

DArtagnan · Posted: Mon May 27, 2002 2:12 pm Post subject:

Hello yagami

JohnnyGTO · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 20 Apr 2002 Posts: 91

Fast is relative... I've got a laptop, PII233 with 128MB ram and it is much faster with Gentoo then any other distro I've tried. That is after it spent a week installing all the software I wanted to use. KDE is snappy once each app is loaded.

My play box is a PIII 450 with 5 IBM 10000 UW scsi drives and 768MB ram (it is amazing with companies throw out, really!). I have more complaints with this then the laptop even though it is faster. It is beening held back I think by 1) the processor (anyone know what the fastest PIII slot A is?) and 2) the fact it has a PCI ATI Rage(?)PRO 128 video card. Video just doesn't seem as smooth, clean or fast as my windoze machine using a Matrox G550 (they share one of the monitors with a KVM).

But again it is faster then Mandrake and seems faster then XP (which it dual boots).

niyogi · Posted: Mon May 27, 2002 3:21 pm Post subject: for the tips

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=3209

alec · Apprentice Joined: 19 Apr 2002 Posts: 270 Location: Here

tyreth · Posted: Mon May 27, 2002 3:34 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the thread link, I have that bookmarked for when I start installing gentoo on a couple of machines (mine, and two of my cousin's probably).

jcmkk · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 May 2002 Posts: 124

Gentoo is definitely faster than any other distro I've tried, but a lot of the speed depends on what applications you use. That is what Gentoo is good at, you install the applications you want, and they are all compiled to run as fast as they can on your hardware. Other distros pick the software for you.

sibn · n00b Joined: 15 May 2002 Posts: 36

TheWart · Posted: Tue May 28, 2002 1:12 am Post subject:

Gentoo is by far the fastest OS I have ever used, except in some instances (games specifically) windows is. THen again, most games in linux are running under some sorta wine layer which i think slows them down (FPS's that is)
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On the box it said it was designed for Win XP or better, so why won't it work with Linux?

FINITE · Guru Joined: 10 May 2002 Posts: 449

Its fast tahts for sure, for me games run just a little bit faster than in windows and the programs/apps all run way faster. Its the isntalling everything from source that is slow, once finnished installing be prepared to be hauling arse though. The one complaint I have about Gentoo is the time consumption involved with installing from source off a stage1 cd. But thats the price you pay for such a configurable and optomized os.

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

. <-- that fast

sibn · n00b Joined: 15 May 2002 Posts: 36

Curious · Posted: Wed May 29, 2002 3:39 am Post subject:

sibn · n00b Joined: 15 May 2002 Posts: 36

tyreth · Posted: Wed May 29, 2002 3:54 am Post subject:

Curious · Posted: Wed May 29, 2002 3:56 am Post subject: