[Haifux] No! No! Don't compile your kernel!

[Shlomi Fish]

On Monday 24 Jan 2011 12:55:04 Nadav Har'El wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 24, 2011, Shlomi Fish wrote about "Re: No! No! Don't compile 
your kernel!":
>
> > built seemed snappier than the shipped-in Mandriva kernel, and it
> > Freecell  Solver executed there at 72.7685720920563s instead of
> > 73.6936609745026s (the
> 
> I hope that you agree with me that 99.9218485921% of the users wouldn't
> bother themselves with recompilation (or any other manual step for that
> matter) to make their games run 1.27127529900685765% faster ;-)

shlomif[fcs]:~$ perl -E 'say 
((73.6936609745026-72.7685720920563)/72.7685720920563*100)'
1.27127529900685

Kudos for the exact calculation. And yes, I agree that most people won't 
bother with this, but still the system running the vanilla kernel otherwise 
felt faster and snappier, and some people may wish to go to the extra trouble 
for that. (Without caring too much about the 1.27% speed increase in Freecell 
Solver's speed.). I don't know how much, and I'm possibly quite above the 
average computer user, but this option should still be relevant.

I agree with you that most people should not bother with this and just use the 
packages that their distribution provides.

All that put aside, as a software developer, I don't find 1% speed increases 
negligible, because when put together, they add up to significant savings. See 
what I wrote about it here:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Optimizing_Code_for_Speed

(Search for «"Small"» (with the double-quotes, but without the angle quotes).

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

> 
> -- 
> Nadav Har'El                        |      Monday, Jan 24 2011, 19 Shevat
> 5771
> nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-------------------------------------
> ---- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |My password is my dog's name. His
> name is http://nadav.harel.org.il           |a#j!4 at h, but I change it
> every month. 

I think this joke would be funnier if it said "and I change it every month." 
instead of "but I change it every month.".

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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