[SC.LUG] Mandrake 10.1 incredibly slow browsing on a small number of sites

[Ian Molton]

Damian Parker wrote:

> Im also a great Gentoo follower, installing it everywhere. My poor
> IBM ThinkPad laptop was on its knee's running Windows XP, or Fedora
> Core 2/3 or SuSE but on Gentoo its lightning, mainly because its
> compiled and running only the things I want it to.

If I may interject... just because its 'compiled' doesnt mean its 
faster. (you mean self-compiled anyway - all distros are compiled)

Typical software shows a ~2-5% performance improvement when optimised 
for i686 rather than i386, nothing significant.

where your speed increase DOES come from is, partly as you say, from 
installing only what yoou want, but even more than that its down to 
having very recent versions of some packages, eg. recent gcc, glibc, 
binutils, X, etc.

the possibility for new bugs is increased by being bleeding edge, but in 
my experience of doing self-build linux systems, it is *generally* 
outweighed by the bug *fixing* thats also gone into a new release.

(just adding some balance into the self-build is better argument. Im a 
die hard LFS user anyway ;-)