[wellylug] distro performance

[Jim Cheetham]

On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 05:32:48PM -0700, Brent Wood wrote:
> I've mentioned before how running this under Linux is much faster than Windows.
> Possibly a fuction of mingw/gcc efficiency, but as pragmatists, we'll go with
> Linux, why is not really an issue. We just want it to run fast.

An interesting result, basically observing that AMD64 and SLED10 may be
a very good combination for speed ;-)

But it strikes me you've described a lot of effort gone into testing
different machines/kernels/compilers, without putting an equivalent
amount of effort into profiling the code itself to eliminate
bottlenecks.

I can anecdotally say that my first real-customer perl program took over
4 minutes to execute on my 486 with (errm ... red hat? this was years
ago; I've forgotten) and when it was moved onto a 586 with a similar
Linux, it took around 1 minute ... but the difference was primarily
memory and disk, not cpu. Optimising to get rid of the disk access (in
other words, learning to use perl properly!) took the whole thing down
to 1:30 on the 486 and ~20 secs on the 586.

-jim