Is Gentoo truly faster than Slackware as they claim? In general, which is more efficient and loads Linux faster? Gentoo or Slackware? I know, I should probably, define what I mean by faster, but I mean to say in general in your opinions.

I run both and find that Gentoo is faster, but not by much. Noticable but not overly so.

If you want to be superanal about the speed, Download the whole source or as its is updated and change the Slackbuild CFLAGS to "-O3 -march=i686 -mcpu=i686 -pipe" and recompile the kernel. I use -O2 because its more stable and read the script because sometime PV puts notes saying that i cant use -O2 or -O3 or it has to be -O3 or mush be -march=i386. But I Slackbuilt KDE 3.4.1 and it load about 4 secs faster so go figure. Of coarse the package was i386 :P

maybe look at it this way :
if you run a gentoo machine, then 50 % of the time the compiler is running in background.
so Slackware is 50 % faster all over...
( and it saves energy... )

egag

Why the hell would you run a C/C++ compiler in the background doing nothing most of the time, if its not being used all the time? How does that make it 'faster'?

to keep up a gentoo sys, there's a lot of compiling to do.
it's not sitting back but updating sys. & program files.

ok, that 50 % doesn't make sense ( it wasn't meant to ), but i want to put it another way:
when taking all the compiling work into account,
then Slack delivers more " user fun " per clock cycle.

egag

Ok, although I would still consider myself a novice in Linux, and yes biased, just a little, since the only other distro I tried was Mandrake 8.1 , but it seems to me that compiling every little damn thing when it maybe most of the time doesn't even make more than a milli or a nano second difference, no noticeable difference in performance and loading, then gentoo users must have waaay too much time to kill, and like waiting for things to compile, when they could actually be doing more useful and less time wasting things, and are nitpicky on that extra "umph" that really is not there. Sure extra speed is nice, but when losing a lot of time to simply "optomize" code that probably is already as optomized as much as it can be, and potentially sacrificing stability, to me is not worth the time, and hassle.........Call me crazy, but thats just me..

Considering that most user machines wait for user input 99% of the day, I don't see the point. I would never use Gentoo on production machines.
(And yes, I have used Gentoo quite a bit)

Ok, I have one more thing to say, and I know it will probably offend maybe even some Slackers, one other quesiton and point I would like to add, do you think that Gentoo users are most likely also to be the ones who have overclocked their PCs? I mean, sure, overclocking sounds like fun as a hobby, but I would NOT want my server or desktop to have an extra ghz if it decreases the stability of the machine, and there is more issue on cooling. To reiterate the point I made early, I am all for speed, but not at the cost of stability, and when it probably would not make any difference anyways.

If I found a someone overclocking a server, I would fire them.
Servers are *nothing* if not stable.

Thanks guys for your analyses of my question.

What do the flags -02 & -03 relate to and how many options are there?

-O : Optimize, following by the optimisation level for gcc

try :

Wow, there are tons of options!!!

What would be a good reason not to use -O3, as it seems to include all optimizations, increases
both compilation time and the performance of the generated code?

Maybe for stability reason, that requires testing though

Also -march option may be used as well for fine tunning the optimization
For my part, I generally use -O2 -march=athlon-xp (I have barton xp 2600+)
and I am happy with that