[Gllug] [OT] Appreciation

[Nix]

On 17 Dec 2006, Juergen Schinker uttered the following:
> Am Sa, 16.12.2006, 23:40, schrieb Mike Brodbelt:
>> 4/ Better performance
>>
>> For most apps, this is irrelevant - an optimised ls is hardly a win. In
>> some few specific cases, you may indeed be better off (mplayer comes to
>> mind, but even there, as long as you can playback full frame, it's fast
>> enough). However, the cost of that is a vast amount of compute cycles
>> wasted building stuff over & over again.
>
> you have never had the pleasure of optimized mplayer (or openoffice)

Sorry, you don't know what you're talking about.

mplayer detects the CPU in use at runtime, and switches its
time-critical inner loops to use CPU-optimized code, so your purported
advantage is negated.

OpenOffice spends nearly all of its time waiting for the user. The
longest single delay anywhere is relocation delays imposed by
OpenOffice's heavy use of dlopen(), and *that* isn't fixable until
OpenOffice gets restructured to use DT_NEEDED more. I kind of doubt that
Gentoo has totally rewritten ld-linux.so.2 (in fact I'm sure they
haven't; they have very few patches to glibc in fact: many fewer than
Debian) so therefore this problem must be every bit as significant on
Gentoo as on Debian.


(I must say the actual Gentoo developers are a lot more nuanced about
the benefits and disadvantages of Gentoo than you are. That's probably
because they know what they're talking about, rather than having to rely
on unthinking religious devotion.)

>> The best case I can see for using Gentoo is for learning about the build
>> tools and how the system hangs together. For that though Linux from
>> Scratch would be a better choice, on a test system (or an emulated VM on
>> your Debian box:-) ).
>
> No i run Debian only in an VM on a Gentoo Host;

Uh, if you're running it in a VM then the slowdowns you're seeing are
probably caused by virtualization overhead.

-- 
`He accused the FSF of being "something of a hypocrit", which
 shows that he neither understands hypocrisy nor can spell.'
   --- jimmybgood
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