On Thu, Aug 26, 2004 at 12:26:15PM -0400, David Cary Hart wrote: > Most of the Fedora RPMS are provided as i386. These can easily be > recompiled as: > > rpmbuild --target i686 --rebuild package.src.rpm > > a. Is it worth it? In other words, is there really a performance gain in > packages like - say - KDE? > > b. Assuming that I installed the RPM sources and built from the spec > file, as long as I am at it, could I also benefit by changing some of > the FLAGS? > > For example: > CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" > CFLAGS="-march=pentium4 -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer" You will only know for sure if you try it. However I look at the activity on my system and it is mostly idle or when sluggish disk I/O bound. This tells me that CPU specific optimizations are not critical for my use. In my opinion the most productive place for code optimizations is library functions not common application space. A productive operational trick that feels like an optimization is a little readahead script that keeps my commonly used bits (applications and libraries) in DRAM. See /etc/init.d/readahead -- T o m M i t c h e l l Just say no to 74LS73 in 2004
