which packages are worth a recompile?

kendosperling · 2008-07-01 12:54:23

I just discovered pacbuilder in 'Community Contributions' and now i am wondering which packages are worth a recompile to get some speed improvement.

Up to now i only read of ffmpeg will work faster with sse3 enabled.

What do you think?

dyscoria · 2008-07-01 13:56:31

Personally, I don't believe there is enough performance gain to warrant recompiling most packages. Anything to do with audio/video encoding, and perhaps firefox with PGO enabled, is a different story but otherwise it isn't really worth it. I think that's one of the reasons why gentoo is losing popularity as people realise that the performance gains for compiling an entire system is negligible.

I compile mplayer-svn, x264-git, firefox and my own kernel, though the kernel is for non-speed related reasons.

brebs · 2008-07-01 14:46:25

Run uptime and look at the system load averages. The CPU on a normal PC is going to be pathetically under-utilized anyway, unless you're creating the next cartoon movie

Compilation flags do not improve RAM, motherboard, video card or hard drive speeds. CPU speed is only a part of the equation of PC performance.

Hence Gentoo is dying, especially since it has ridiculous political squabbling.

kendosperling · 2008-07-01 17:32:38

@brebs i know this. But never the less if there are any improvements why should i not try to use them. You already said most systems are idle a lot, this time could also be used to compile some packages in the background while surfing or reading your mail. I am sure there are some packages that will benefit.

carlocci · 2008-07-01 18:41:29

brebs wrote:

Hence Gentoo is dying, especially since it has ridiculous political squabbling.

This is so awesome: it really looks like an internal struggle in a corrupted democracy.

kendosperling wrote:

@brebs i know this. But never the less if there are any improvements why should i not try to use them. You already said most systems are idle a lot, this time could also be used to compile some packages in the background while surfing or reading your mail. I am sure there are some packages that will benefit.

I believe that the benefit is so small that the time spent compiling fairly exceeds the time you save at every run, even if you run the program for several millennia.

It's like with photovoltaic panels where the energy spent on building the panel itself exceeds the energy the panel will produce during its lifetime.

It would be more efficient if you became a software developer or an engineer only to design a faster architecture to run the program on or develop a faster program, and then retire.
Of course I'm exaggerating, but it's much more poetic this way.

brebs · 2008-07-01 21:09:26

kendosperling wrote:

But never the less if there are any improvements why should i not try to use them.

Because it's simply not worth the effort.

You see, if it *was* worth the effort, then one or more of the mainstream distros would have an app which recompiles and reinstalls glibc while we sleep.

It's not done, and not even suggested AFAIK, because the performance benefit is negligible, and the risk (however small) of the PC fouling up during the upgrade will have wailing newbies moaning that their PC is unbootable.

An idle system consumes less power than when it's compiling glibc, and it's far less likely to go FUBAR due to overheating, or faulty RAM flipping a rather important bit.

Notice I'm talking about the mainstream users, rather than geeks with enough knowledge to be dangerous, tinkering with their toys Source-based distros are great for learning purposes.

emphire · 2008-07-01 21:51:54

Use your machine as you normally do for a while then:
Run 'top' and type: Ol<enter>
That will sort your processes by the amount of CPU time they've used (atleast the long-running ones). You could also try to catch some of the shorter running ones by looking for processes with a high %CPU when they're busy.

I'm considering compiling firefox, Xorg, compiz, and exaile (and maybe python).

iBertus · 2008-07-01 22:51:19

You can recompile the kernel without the stuff you don't need, but this isn't going to really up performance much. If you want better performance setup RAID, buy some RAM, overclock your stuff. These will pay more in the long run.

Oh, and if you have a 64-bit CPU install Arch64. It's already pretty optimized for the new CPUs. I contend that with 64-bit CPUs commonplace now, any 64-bit distro is fairly optimized. This was not true for the old i386 vs i686 optimization arguments.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-07-01 12:54:23

which packages are worth a recompile?

#2 2008-07-01 13:56:31

Re: which packages are worth a recompile?

#3 2008-07-01 14:46:25

Re: which packages are worth a recompile?

#4 2008-07-01 17:32:38

Re: which packages are worth a recompile?

#5 2008-07-01 18:41:29

Re: which packages are worth a recompile?

#6 2008-07-01 21:09:26

Re: which packages are worth a recompile?

#7 2008-07-01 21:51:54

Re: which packages are worth a recompile?

#8 2008-07-01 22:51:19

Re: which packages are worth a recompile?

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