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Measuring The Benefits Of The Gentoo Approach
An anonymous reader writes "We're constantly hearing how the source based nature of the Gentoo distro makes better use of your hardware, but no-one seems to have really tested it. What kind of gains are involved over distros which use binary packaging? The article is here."
Except in this case they all had the same hardware on each machine...
Besides, before doing any comparisons on Debian vs. Gentoo they should have compared Gentoo vs. Gentoo on different optimizations. Like using -O2, -Osize, -mfp-math=sse. Comparing video drivers. Trying different filesystem types. And a whole gaggle of other configurables at compile-time.
You'd be yelling bloody murder if Microsoft sponsored a study without doing this sort of research before pitting Windows vs. Linux.
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
There are a lot of issues one can bring up with the test - not identical versions of various software; different X drivers, one distro will have patches missing in the others and so on. Clearly, that greatly influences the results.
And that is a good point to take home. Optimizing compiles is _not_ the panacea for speed and responsiveness that - a minority, I believe - of source-based distros tend to bring up. There are so many other factors intimately involved in it that any benefits are generally lost in the noise.
For some specific components, it can be a good idea - but for those, most distros tend to ship several optimized versions that the installer chooses between at installation time.
Another domain that benefits are specialized, compute-intensive applications; things like simulators or other technical stuff. But then, those apps are generally tweaked and compiled by their users no matter what distro is used anyway.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
A hearty helping of wtf is in order. Some of your other points are ok, though ;).
XML causes global warming.
There seems to be little attention given to the fundamental unfairness of this test presented.
The distributions were running with different software versions initially and although this was corrected there seems to have been little consideration given to the minor tweaks given to each different installation used. Which services were running on each system? Were the kernel settings identical in use? Were the machines experiencing differences in performance due to the X setup causing X to add different loads?
etc.
Fundamentally this test was probably not complete enough to suggest anything in particular. Perhaps it would have been better to boot a single machine three times and perform the sequence of events exactly the same each time as this would have also ruled out some other potential factors.
Jon.
http://www.jonmasters.org/
It seems that the people that would benefit the most from a source-based distro and optimizing binaries specifically for their hardware are the ones with the slow hardware that will take too much time to get everything installed for it to be a worthwhile investment of time.
However, I think that a kernel compile _is_ a fair measure of overall system performance. It involves lots of disk, memory, and processor access, so it's a decent indicator of across the board performance.
As far as kernel compile versions go, from the article:
So the kernel source was the same, not Gentoo source.
You say the performance problems are because they got the CFLAGS wrong. If this is the case it only seems to underscore how easy it is to screw up optimizations with Gentoo. It's great for people that know all the proper optimizations for a particular piece of hardware, but I think the majority of people just don't know this offhand.
In any case I find it very interesting the big differences you can see in performance between distributions on the same hardware (and I'm assuming similar kernel versions).
AccountKiller
It definitely is not unless they were using unpatched sources in all three systems. The Gentoo sources applies bunches of patches to the stock kernel which would affect compile time.
RTFA. "The same 2.4.21 source was copied to all machines and compiled using the same options. However, it should be noted that the Debian system used gcc 3.3.1 whilst the Mandrake and Gentoo installations used gcc 3.3.2"
I didn't see anywhere in the story if the Gentoo installation was done from scratch stage1 or from stage3. I would think this would be a very important piece of information to mention.
Where the Music Matters
It's not worth it. Moving from distro to distro for performance is pretty ridiculous.
Here's what I'd consider, since this is where the biggest differences lie:
* How frequently are new releases announced? Frequent new releases may be better for hobbyists, but a pain in the ass for servers sitting in a back room somewhere. (It's the reason RH can see an enterprise edition that's simply not released as frequently).
* How do you like the packaging system? Try out apt, emerge, up2date (actually, don't -- up2date truly sucks. Everyone using RH who cares about automatic updating has long since started using apt or (IMHO, better) yum).
* How do you like the config system? Most vendors have their own interface to let you configure the system. RH used to use linuxconf, and is now using Redhat-config. SuSE uses yast.
* How much do you care about commercial support? A few widely used distros tend to get the only commercial support. Mandrake gets a little, but if you're going to be running packages that require support (especially binary-only), you're probably best off with Red Hat.
* Which desktop environment do you want to use? Mandrake puts more work into KDE on their system, Red Hat into GNOME.
Arguments about speed or features is really pretty meaningless -- common software is generally packaged for most of these, and rare software for none (use checkinstall to *make* packages -- you'll be much happier). It's still Linux with the GNU suite present.
People that switch from distro to distro (or maintain *multiple* distros on their machine) are nuts, IMHO. It's a fair amount of work to relearn the quirks of each
May we never see th
Although I never actually *measured* anything, I have been moving all my boxen (except for one Duron on which I have found it quite impossible to compile Gentoo) to Gentoo 1.4rc4. I was actually in the process of building my own compile-in-place GNU/Linux called "Q-Gnu/Linux" when I discovered Gentoo did it all, and did it better. I was all RedHat before that (going so far as to wear a red fedora on parties - I have two of those). I find Gentoo as opposed to RedHat quite impressive, at least. My professional workhorse (on which I'm currently typing) is a Toshiba Satellite Pro 4300:
..with 384MB RAM.. and was becoming annoyingly slow in things requiring major GUI complexity, like OpenOffice, and at compiling many Java classes.
:-), and pretend.. :-) :-)..
model name : Celeron (Coppermine)
stepping : 3
cpu MHz : 597.077
cache size : 128 KB
Compiling Gentoo on there allowed the machine a third chance at life, the second one being when I got it (already old then) and installed RedHat on it, over that would-be-OS it came with. It just feels that much faster again. I am no longer annoyed by it at all. It took more than 4 days to compile all I wanted from the Gentoo 1.4rc4, but it was *well* worth it.
I moved my personal little server, an Athlon Thunderbird, with the same impression. Currently running
emerge system
on my brand new Athlon XP 2600, expecting much from it.
Bottom line: Nothing but Kudos for Gentoo, wondering what went wrong during the tests described, or whether somehow the subjective speedups I have experienced are just auto-suggestion. I think not. I have been staring at CRT's since 1980, thats 23 years folks! And I tell ya compiling stuff yourself is worth it. So if you have time on your side, go for LFS, which I did, and slowly ground into Q-GNU/Linux. If you have some time, but not *that* much time, go for Gentoo, if you have no time, you poor shmuck, either get a life, or install SuSe
If you invest a lot of time in learning a distro, you're terrified that it might not be the best, and will spend ridiculous amounts of time insulting the others.
Hence, the distro wars.
May we never see th
They optimized Gentoo for the p3 platform? Celeron 1.4 ghz and above is based on the p4 core.
You're right, I don't, and neither does anyone else. Even in your case, memory IO is likely to be as much of a bottleneck as the CPU, if not more. One of the reasons the new Mac walks over PCs in Photoshop benchmarks is massive memory bandwidth.
CPUs still aren't fast enough for me.
maybe I'm not representative of 'most users'
at work I do video processing and at home i play games and encode DVDs to mpeg4.
Even 2.4ghz cpus take hours to encode entire movies... I can get a little better than realtime encoding to mpeg4, but when you add two-pass, and the fact that the videos are so damn long... I wish i could get a terahertz CPU...
you try running a 2 pass encode on a 6 hour 720x480 DV video file and then tell me your CPU is fast enough.
it always makes me chuckle when people say that 'this or that' part of the PC is as fast as it needs to be.
There all sorts of things we can't do because our systems aren't nearly fast enough.
The only way to have the same hardware is to use the same machine for each distro. Period.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Of course, some realize that distros are good at different things and don't (seriously) insult any of them.
I use Gentoo on my two main boxes, simply because I toyed with it and haven't found a good reason to switch away yet (two just so I have the same environment on my two main machines). That said, my router runs Debian-testing. I maintain Mandrake machines at work, know my way around a RedHat machine... etc. My 486 ran Slack 8 while it was up. My DECStation runs NetBSD (though that's a different issue entirely).
I catch flack for using Gentoo, RedHat, Mandrake... my point is, it doesn't matter at all. Use the right tool for the job - that's what open source, and moreso just diversity in the computing environment, is good for! As long as everything speaks TCP+UDP/IP, who cares? ^^
--Knots;
Anarchy$ dd if=/dev/random of=~/.signature bs=120 count=1
Ok, I'm a gentoo user. I'll admit a sizable percentage of our ranks dont know what they're talking about, i'll even admit that most distro "speed" is in the users head. But most of you are missing the point. Many gentoo users (including myself) installed gentoo as an ongoing learning experience. Sure, there's really no difference between the "l337ness" of typing emerge foobar and typing rpm -ivh foobar. But those of us who have taken the time to understand the portage system have learned a great deal. As an aspiring programmer, this was my distro of choice because it enabled me to learn about gcc. Also, i like the idea of (although most install standard packages) being able to beta test bleeding edge applications. While there are a lot of phoney gentoo users who are under the impression that theyre furthering the opensource movement by emerging packages, gentoo's backbone a highly active community of volunteers who are really interested in Open Source. Basically, all i'm trying to say is that any idiot can probably get gentoo installed and working, but the real point is to understand the OS that you've built, and i've found that gentoo helps me and others do this better than package based distros.