Mark Mielke wrote:
I guess this issue is important to me because I find it a little
embarassing that my wonderful 'linux desktop' at work takes 3X as long
to start my web browser, and 10X as long to start my word
processor.
Actually, look at the Gentoo forums. There are plenty of cases where the
binaries provided by upstream prohects are faster than the "optimized"
ones compiles by Gentoo users (mozilla and
openoffice.org, IIRC). For
large programs, app load times are *probably* best when compiled with
-Os, something that is rarely done by Gentoo users. Typical Gentoo
CFLAGS are "-O2 blah" or "-O3 blah". In my experience, -O2 yields the
best results, but I would go with upstream guidance every time.
As for processor optimizations, I am willing to bet that they do not
affect app load times -- places where they might matter are
computationally intense applications like MPlayer or scientific computation.
Pardon the ramblings,
Rahul
--
Rahul Karnik
rahul(a)genebrew.com
http://www.genebrew.com/