Linux Benchmarking

[Evan Leibovitch]

Henry Spencer wrote:

>>> Which distro is the fastest.
>>    
>>
>
>As others have already explained, there is unlikely to be any meaningful
>difference.  They're all running pretty much the same kernel and pretty
>much the same compilers and libraries; speed differences will most likely
>be accidents of how up-to-date they are and how well configured they are
>for a particular set of hardware. 
>

The "how well configured" IMO is part of the original question. How well 
are various distros tuned for certain environments? How much work do 
they need to be reasonably optimized?

Ie, I recall that some distros were faster than others to ship with 
kernels pre-configured to run better with Pentiums at the expense of 486 
operation. Now that we have 64-bit coming along, some distros are now 
shipping versions optimized for that. Yeah, anyone could eventually 
figure out how to do this, but for the newcomer obviously it's best to 
find something that comes out of the box reasonably well tuned.

Also, aren't there also some source-based distros that probe the 
hardware and then set compile-time options based on what's found? 
Wouldn't they run faster (all else equal) than an installation that was 
more one-size-fits-all, in exchange for a more-complex install process?

- Evan


--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml