Compile times and Hardware(moved post from portage)

[kramerkeller]

Alright so - I am having some problems, but for the most part I like gentoo so far better than all the other distros because at least when I am having a hard time - I know what the hell is kinda going on.

However, the compiling the compiling. Now I am getting better at knowing when and when not to - and when I have to do newuse and etc-update and that stuff. SO I over do things sometimes being newb, but still there is lots of time going into compiling.

Since I hate windows and I have a machine running windows - I was wondering if it would make a significant difference in compile time if I were to run gentoo on that machine. Right now I have gentoo on a pentium 3 500Mhz. My other pc is an athlon - I believe a duron running at 1.2 Ghz. NOw it only has 256 RAM right now, but I can definetely upgrade if I need to.

Will my compile times be much faster on the athlon? Does more RAM help reduce compile time? How much of a difference will these things make? Can I change some CHOST flags to compile faster - although I have heard about 01, 02, and 03 I have no clue - some are unstable?. Basically what are all the different things I can do to reduce compile time? If need be I'll spend a little money, but not tons. Thanks gentoo guys (& gals).

[norc]

[zieloo]

Take a look at distcc, too:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/distcc.xml
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Distcc_server_on_Windows
And maybe this: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Distcc_over_SSH_with_Portage

[raf]

I used to run very tweaked-out CFLAGS on my gentoo for about a year. Every now and then I had a crash where my whole system would go down. When that happened, I always questioned wheather or now it was a kernel thing or my CFLAGS causing X to crash.

About 6 months ago I asked myself if a 2% speed improvement was really worth a potential stability issue? Well the answer was no! So I re-compiled my entire system with the simple flags "march pipe -O2 fomit-framepointer." After the re-compile I noticed several things: 1) The crashing I was experiencing had nothing to do with my CFLAGS and it was still an issue until the next kernel release. I am now very stable with downtime only on kernel upgrades. So you can have a very stable system with crazy CFLAGS (but half the time they are filtered out by packages anyways). 2) Right now my system is as fast if not faster then my previous "tweaked-out" system. 3) The compile time is AT LEAST 2-3 times faster then before (probably due to using O2 instead of O3).

This is just my opinion and there is a lot of discussion about this (and this is not intended to start another one) but compile your system with gcc-3.4.4 for your particular processor (with pipe -O2 fomit-framepointer) and that will be the biggest speed increase you'll get. There are some hardcore flags you can set such as fast-math but those are already set by packages that know how to use them (such as mplayer).
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-Raf

[mdshort]

Not to start anything, but the proper CFLAG is -pipe not "pipe".

Sorry, it was bugging me.
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"With every rise, there is a fall."

[raf]

For people like mdshort:

[kramerkeller]

I am trying to consolidate my posts so as not to be rude. I think distcc is solution and of course moving to my computer that is faster _ i guess will make huge differenec. I said athlon, but I meant DURON. SO again I will ask, 500Mhz pentium or 1.2 Ghz Duron. I don't know whole lots about proccessors, but I know celeron's suck and I didn't know if Duron's were alright - or if at least if my "faster" duron is actually in fact faster then the pentium.

And - I see RAM makes a difference - would RAM make the greater difference or Processor speed - in compiling.


As far as distcc goes I have another post up on other things gentoo.