Benchmarks Of The Gentoo-based Sabayon

[Hoodlum]

Also, everybody seems to believe a myth about Gentoo. That you compile and compile and compile and during compilation your system is useless.
Nonsense! You compile all the stuff once. I did that 5 years ago. Yes five years. I spent a lot of time for compilation back then. Now I update my system every weekend. Usually, a dozen packages has an update. That takes about half an hour.

That's not much longer that much longer than all the time my system currently spends keeping up with the Fedora churn tbh!

But what's the funny thing? During compilation you can do whatever you do even without compilation, because compilation in Gentoo is the same process as apt-get is in Ubuntu. You just write emerge plus the package you want and that's all.
Yes! Compilation in Gentoo is easy, no need to touch makefiles or anything else. Just one command. There is even a gui for that. The difference with apt-get is that you don't see a progress bar, but just the compilation output.

I think Chakra should give gentoo quite a boost once it gets out of alpha/beta. I might actually give gentoo another go next time I install....I mostly just use fedora because it's not hugely dissimilar to the Scientific Linux systems at work (and I don't have to maintain it much, reinstalls are quick etc).

What's the benefit? Ofcourse speed is one of them but is not the most important. Absolute control is the most important of all. You can choose whatever is going to be installed in your system. You don't want pulseaudio with your gnome? You won't have it. You don;t want policykit either? You won;t have it. You don't want Hal? Easy! You don't want java with your Openoffice, no problem. That leads to a system so light that it can be fast even without compile optimizations. And hell is modern. It will be as modern as Ubuntu, or OpenSUSE, or Fedora 3 months before their releases, and after their releases, Gentoo is gonna be again be 3 months ahead.
That's Gentoo. You love it or hate it. It's a trouble once but after that a permanent pleasure!

Heh I really miss the rolling releases from arch, gentoo etc but alas AUR is less up-to-date than fedora and I didn't fancy compiling everything. Maybe i'll give it a go, it can't take too long on a 4ghz quad core, 8gb ram and an SSD can it? Though, i'm dreading the OO.o / KDE4 compilations...

[n0nsense]

No offense but it would take years of transcoding to make up the difference of time lost due to computing especially when said transcoding apps usually detect a processors capability on launch. Not to mention the fact that having the latest greatest instruction support and the most aggressive compilation options doesn't necessarity mean any performance gain and can actually be slower then a prebuilt with more generic compilations. This is especially true in the 64-bit realm where SSE2 is the bare minimum of instruction set support and is default on even the prebuilts packages. Those minimal set of libraries that can actually see moderate gains are also easily rebuilt for those tasks on any linux OS as well.

I have based my calculations on installation time ~5-10 hours net time many years ago and 25% performance advantage.
I definitely spent less time on maintaining Gentoo than Ubuntu or Windows.
Why 25% ? because that's the average difference i saw on 64bit system.
So a have earned a lot of useful time
In theory, you are right. I know what I want and especially what i don't want. I don't need PA for my desktop and PA isn't ready for my HTPC - useless.
I have never used evolution - don't want to see it or any of it's parts on my system
Why should i care ?
1. it is almost 10USD/GB on /
2. KISS

The other thing, is that if you have two (or more)systems (better with same architecture ), then you win even more. Packages are very portable You can share the resources, but compile only once.


To all "We can do it (compile) too" good luck
I still remember that Debian dependencies nightmare.
"In order to build this package you need following 18546 packages.
some of this packages are unavailable for some reason"
Everything can be done on every distro.
Gentoo makes it ultimately easy to have it your own way.
Sorry, i spent my hard earned money on HW and i want to use every bit. Even that useless sse 4.1.
25% performance increase may cost you thousands dollars on newer higher end HW. Why to waste what you already have ?
I'm typing on Win 7 and sometimes i can change writing language (layout switch) continue typing and see the change taking effect only after i already typed couple of words. Fine example of sluggish.
Ubuntu 7.10-9.04 was horrible in terms of performance.
I do follow binary distributions (have my parents and some friends).
Switching them to Sabayon. If you read carefully how to mix Portage with Entropy and then follow ... just amazing what you can do in few commands/clicks

[deanjo]

I have based my calculations on installation time ~5-10 hours net time many years ago and 25% performance advantage.
I definitely spent less time on maintaining Gentoo than Ubuntu or Windows.
Why 25% ? because that's the average difference i saw on 64bit system.
So a have earned a lot of useful time
In theory, you are right. I know what I want and especially what i don't want. I don't need PA for my desktop and PA isn't ready for my HTPC - useless.
I have never used evolution - don't want to see it or any of it's parts on my system
Why should i care ?
1. it is almost 10USD/GB on /
2. KISS

The other thing, is that if you have two (or more)systems (better with same architecture ), then you win even more. Packages are very portable You can share the resources, but compile only once.


To all "We can do it (compile) too" good luck
I still remember that Debian dependencies nightmare.
"In order to build this package you need following 18546 packages.
some of this packages are unavailable for some reason"
Everything can be done on every distro.
Gentoo makes it ultimately easy to have it your own way.
Sorry, i spent my hard earned money on HW and i want to use every bit. Even that useless sse 4.1.
25% performance increase may cost you thousands dollars on newer higher end HW. Why to waste what you already have ?
I'm typing on Win 7 and sometimes i can change writing language (layout switch) continue typing and see the change taking effect only after i already typed couple of words. Fine example of sluggish.
Ubuntu 7.10-9.04 was horrible in terms of performance.
I do follow binary distributions (have my parents and some friends).
Switching them to Sabayon. If you read carefully how to mix Portage with Entropy and then follow ... just amazing what you can do in few commands/clicks

With what package library gains you 25% especially in 64-bit (where SSE2 support is on by default and provides the greatest speed increase in encoding and even that is not a 25% speed boost)? It's surely isn't lame/ffmpeg/x264/faac

[BlackStar]

Normal thinking human being (Homo Sapience rev 2.1) will learn a lot from first Gentoo installation. And "install" Gentoo only once (then make your own stage 4). You can use/update this few GB stage later.

Does Gentoo teach you anything that, say, Arch doesn't?

[Apopas]

With what package library gains you 25% especially in 64-bit (where SSE2 support is on by default and provides the greatest speed increase in encoding and even that is not a 25% speed boost)? It's surely isn't lame/ffmpeg/x264/faac

I suppose n0nsense means the average difference between 64 bit vs 32 bit.

Does Gentoo teach you anything that, say, Arch doesn't?

Well I learnt everything I know about gcc and icc flags and optimizations in general. A source based distro helps a lot there.
Also, I have not find a benefit yet to use Arch instead of Sabayon which is a binary edition of Gentoo.

[deanjo]

I suppose n0nsense means the average difference between 64 bit vs 32 bit.

If that's the case then that pretty much applies to all distro's as again all 64-bit x86 packages have a higher level of instruction set baseline support. In 32-bit this could have appreciable differences if the package was built with a i386 baseline vs something like a prescott baseline. Those gains however are not nearly as dramatic in 64-bit where baseline is MMX, SSE, SSE2, 3dNOW!, enhanced 3dNOW! and 64-bit instruction set extensions.

[Apopas]

If that's the case then that pretty much applies to all distro's as again all 64-bit x86 packages have a higher level of instruction set baseline support. In 32-bit this could have appreciable differences if the package was built with a i386 baseline vs something like a prescott baseline. Those gains however are not nearly as dramatic in 64-bit where baseline is MMX, SSE, SSE2, 3dNOW!, enhanced 3dNOW! and 64-bit instruction set extensions.

Indeed. Absolutely true. With 64 bit the binary distros approached Gentoo a lot in performance (in 32bit the difference was tremendous), but still they are a bit back. Still Gentoo can be tweaked more though and have a small percentage advantage in performance as the link Gentoo vs Ubuntu shows, but as I mentioned again and again, the benefits of Gentoo are the ultimate control and "clearness" of the system.
(what's the opposite of the word "bloat"?)

[deanjo]

(what's the opposite of the word "bloat"?)

"lean" would probably be the word your searching for.

[Apopas]

"lean" would probably be the word your searching for.

Indeed, that serves. Thank you.

[deanjo]

Just for example I just compiled a couple handbrake (and it's supporting libraries which is extremely easy to do since it builds them specifically for hb use) using the recommended gentoo flags for Phenom II's. I then ran the same encode using the prepackaged rpm vs gentoos recommended vs AMD's recommended aggressive flags. Net result was a delta of 2% between the best version (AMD agressive flags) and worst versions (rpm and Gentoo recommended which were within seconds of each other and fall within standard deviation).