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

[Rick]

On Friday 31 December 2004 21:05, Ian Molton wrote:
> If I may interject... just because its 'compiled' doesnt mean its
> faster. (you mean self-compiled anyway - all distros are compiled)

It depends on the application, sure for 99% of the stuff on a system it really 
makes no odds, but for those few applications that can make use of cpu 
features it really helps.

For me CPU optomisation is a perk, Gentoo's killer feature is portage.

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

It depends on your hardware, I am running AMD64 on my desktop, running 32bit 
seems such a waste. Anyway a 5% increase for something like povray is nothing 
to be sniffed at, it can also make a real difference on less than stellar 
hardware. A couple of extra FPS on video is all that seperates pointless and 
acceptable.

> 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.

I find the stable/masked system that gentoo has in place usually works 
perfectly. Aside from problems compiling some stuff, the only real bugs I 
have encountered are in the kernel, but then I am running on 2.6.9 dev 
sources so its to be expected really.

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

How do you handle package management, updating etc? I was tempted by LFS after 
being seriously put off linux by packaged based distros (and all the usual 
problems) but then found Gentoo and haven't looked back.

Rick