On Sat, Nov 08, 2003 at 01:58:29PM +0100, Mateusz Papiernik wrote: > Andrew Suffield wrote: > >We're all very interested in *real* evidence here, because there > >hasn't been any in the past. If you don't have any evidence, you can > >expect people to call bullshit on this. > > I can't send any *evidence* here, but I can post my own opinions and > experiences with kernels. And I'd say thats not a bullshit. Yes, that's > true that performance gain isn't very big and noticeable, but after > recompiling 2.4.18-bf24 from woody with my own optimisations for athlon, > I noticed little speed up in compiling my programs.
This is probably what is known as "the placebo effect". Human impressions of this form are always entirely disconnected with reality; the mind applies filters based on expectations, that throw them hopelessly adrift. If you build your kernel with options you expect to work faster, it will seem faster; if you take a pill, you feel better. Your perceptions are vaguely reliable for the difference between 10 seconds and one second. They're not so good for the difference between one second and a half second, and they're utterly useless for the difference between fifteen minutes and ten (really). Ironically, this usually results in a small gain in productivity, but that isn't actually dependent on the technical change - just on the user believing that there was one. Large tech support teams occasionally do fake hardware upgrades (strip the box down and put it back together again) for users that complain about their personal system being slow, and it actually "works". -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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