The effort involved in compiling a lot of programs isn't justified by the benefit from doing it, but where you've got a program that's very CPU-intensive (perhaps audio editing software like Audacity) or that's fundamental to your system (like the kernel) then compiling with optimisations for your specific processor can make a huge difference.
A couple of years ago, I timed how long it took GWC to clean-up a 15 minute audio sample before and after optimising my kernel; with the Mandrake-supplied kernel it took 1 minute 30 seconds. After optimising my kernel the same task took 32 seconds.
Funnily enough, I always recompile my own kernel...
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The effort involved in compiling a lot of programs isn't justified by the benefit from doing it, but where you've got a program that's very CPU-intensive (perhaps audio editing software like Audacity) or that's fundamental to your system (like the kernel) then compiling with optimisations for your specific processor can make a huge difference.
A couple of years ago, I timed how long it took GWC to clean-up a 15 minute audio sample before and after optimising my kernel; with the Mandrake-supplied kernel it took 1 minute 30 seconds. After optimising my kernel the same task took 32 seconds.
Funnily enough, I always recompile my own kernel...