I am a member of a local LUG where I live. Lately there has been a lot of interest in the Gentoo distribution. Reportedly it runs faster that other distributions. So I've been loading it onto a Dell GXa 266MHz I happen to have on hand. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/build.html Since the process includes a lot downloading sources and compiling, this is taking some time.
I've had a fair amount of time to explore the site and I have been doing some reading. There are a lot of excellent articles written by the people at Gentoo. http://www.gentoo.org/index-articles.html Well, it seems there is a secret to Gentoo's speed. :-) It is gcc 2.95.2 and here is part of that story. Located about half way down this page: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-dist2.html <quote> Compiler drama During the time we were trying to fix the glibc threads problem, I e-mailed Ulrich Drepper (one of the guys at Cygnus who is heavily involved with glibc development). I mentioned the POSIX thread problem we were having, and that Enoch was using pgcc for optimum performance. And he responded with something like this (I'm paraphrasing here): "Our own compiler included with the CodeFusion product has an excellent x86 backend that produces executables far faster than those generated with pgcc." Obviously, I was very interested in testing out this mystery "turbo" compiler the Cygnus guys had created. I thereupon requested a demo copy of Cygnus Codefusion 1.0 so that I could test it out, and Omegadan and I were amazed to find that this compiler was everything that Ulrich claimed and then some. The x86 backend increased the performance of some of the CPU-intensive executables (like bzip2) by close to 90%! All applications seemed to benefit from at least a 10% real-world performance increase, and all we did was swap out compilers. Enoch even booted 30 - 40% faster. The performance gains were far, far greater than what we gained by switching from gcc to pgcc. <<snip>> after several months they integrated the CodeFusion x86 backend into gcc 2.95.2. Now everyone could benefit from the nice new backend, not just the people who knew about the "secret GPL compiler" included on the CodeFusion CD. But we decided to go ahead and use gcc rather than the CodeFusion compiler. In addition to being more stable, gcc 2.95.2 also allowed us avoid Cygnus, which by this time had been purchased by RedHat for a ridiculous sum of money. (Note: the new x86 backend in gcc 2.95.2 is what gave newer Linux distributions the significant speed boost that we all got to experience. It also gave FreeBSD 4.0 a nice speed boost over 3.3.6. Notice the difference?) </quote>
