Performance tuning the Fedora Desktop

[Warren Togami]

Owen Taylor wrote:
>>On a somewhat related topic of desktop performance, recently fedora.us 
>>Extras has begun experimenting with -Os rather than the standard -O2 
>>optimization for our firefox & thunderbird packages.  So far it seems to 
>>be working very well, with noticably smaller binary RPMS and runtime 
>>memory footprint of these two very large applications.  I asked gcc 
>>developers if they had a guess about which -O2 and -Os would be "faster" 
>>for large applications like firefox & thunderbird.  They generally 
>>replied that they have no idea, because compiler optimization is an 
>>inexact science.  All kinds of other factors come into play like smaller 
>>memory footprint (less swapping), smaller code size (maybe better use of 
>>CPU cache).
>>
>>Have there been any past discussions about changing the standard 
>>compiler optimization for perhaps FC3?
> 
> 
> Well, I think you've described a wonderful project that someone could do
> ... recompile the desktop packages with -Os and do some timing. That's
> the only way we'd know whether we should change the optimization flags
> or not.
> 
> Regards,
> 						Owen
> 
> 

I just noticed today that the recent FC2 kernels are built with -Os 
rather than -O2.  Just another data point for now.

Warren