Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked (Linux Magazine)

Posted Oct 30, 2009 23:35 UTC (Fri) by maney (subscriber, #12630)
In reply to: Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked (Linux Magazine) by flewellyn
Parent article: Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked (Linux Magazine)

So all that careful tweaking optimized your system... as long as you didn't change it much, and then you got to build it over again with new rules to accomodate the new order?

There's a reason Knuth called premature optimization the root of all evil. Just sayin'

Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked (Linux Magazine)

Posted Oct 31, 2009 0:28 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (7 responses)

Computer time is cheap these days. Really really cheap. Worrying about
spending a bit of time recompiling things is pretty much pointless.

Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked (Linux Magazine)

Posted Nov 1, 2009 16:21 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Computer time is cheap. Electricity is not.

Gentoo has a non-trivial impact on your power bill.

Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked (Linux Magazine)

Posted Nov 1, 2009 20:29 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Living in a cold country has a nontrivial impact on my power bill. Heating
the whole house is somewhat more expensive than heating one room, and
heating one room a bit using computational overspill is just gravy :)

(this reason may not apply to countries which aren't cold).

Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked (Linux Magazine)

Posted Nov 2, 2009 10:58 UTC (Mon) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

Poor house insulation has a non-trivial impact on your electricity (/gas/oil/whatever) bill. Which tends to be a bit of a problem in the UK, as it isn't really cold enough to make people tackle the problem seriously :) (I have been in flats here in Germany which kept a comfortable inside temperature when it was -15°C outside and the heating was off (turned off by the thermostat).

Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked (Linux Magazine)

Posted Nov 1, 2009 16:58 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] (3 responses)

Computer time is cheap these days. Really really cheap. Worrying about spending a bit of time running slower applications is pretty much pointless. (Specially as most time is spent running GUIs, where it just doesn't matter if it takes 1 or 1.5 seconds to display something, which the user then ponders a full minute before taking the next step).

Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked (Linux Magazine)

Posted Nov 1, 2009 20:27 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Yes: but you don't take the time recompiling *because* you can recompile,
but for the other reasons people have outlined here (I also like the
ability to easily patch the hell out of things and keep upgrading them
using the distro's tools, only stopping when the thing changes so much one
of the patches no longer applies).

Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked (Linux Magazine)

Posted Nov 2, 2009 10:27 UTC (Mon) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (1 responses)

That's a pretty silly comparison.

For one thing, 1 to 1.5 seconds is a massive difference, and it happens in the middle of something you're doing, which is annoying (generally speaking, if I have to wait more than a couple of hundred milliseconds for a response to an action, I start to get frustrated). On the other hand, running a compile in the background has effectively zero cost.

Perhaps the previous poster should have rephrased as 'throughput is cheap; interactivity is expensive'.

Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked (Linux Magazine)

Posted Nov 2, 2009 15:38 UTC (Mon) by csigler (subscriber, #1224) [Link]

> 'throughput is cheap; interactivity is expensive'

One of the most insightful comments I've read in a long while, esp. the "interactivity is expensive" part.

Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked (Linux Magazine)

Posted Oct 31, 2009 6:04 UTC (Sat) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

That "careful tweaking" amounted to switching the USE flags to "USE kde" instead of "USE gnome", and then "emerge --newuse world".

And the compile only took a few hours, during which time I was at work anyway.