GCC 10 Link-Time Optimization Benchmarks On AMD Threadripper

For most applications, making use of link-time optimizations can help the performance by a few percent.

The PostgreSQL performance improved nicely with LTO optimizations but failed to build on this system with the "-fwhole-program" switch.

SQLite's performance difference was much more minimal.

These results align with our past GCC LTO benchmarks in that making use of link-time optimizations tend to be an easy way to generally squeeze slightly better performance out of large source trees. In some cases the gains can be quite significant as shown in this article. The downside to LTO is greater RAM usage and longer build times, but generally the improved performance of the resulting binary is worthwhile for release builds. Let's hope Fedora and other Linux distributions not yet LTO'ing by default will manage to do so in 2020.