Which distro is fastest on a Pentium 3?
 

Is gentoo a good distribution for use on my Pentium 3 with 256 megs of ram. Or is their something better that is also fast. I would like to know this because Windows is really plain old boring. I want to buy a seconf harddrive for it and use that as my main operating system.:cool:

Why not try gentoo? Or SuSE? Or Mandrake? or.....and so on. Your PIII will only go as fast as it can. It's better to buy the HDD and install something, rather than worrying too much about what is going to run fastest. A lot depends on how you set the distro up. My SuSE 8.2 Celeron 766 with 512MB SDRAM is fast enough for me - except when I'm in a hurry!!!

it's as fast as you make it ;)
the speed of it all depends on the configuration you make, and on the services you run, rather than on the distro...
although with gentoo it's supposedly (!) faster, since you compile everything yourself (so it's adapted to your system) ...

but mainly, for desktop use? I don't think it will make a world of difference :) just try to find something that feels just right

A properly configured gentoo system with the appropriate CCFLAGS set will run the fastest on any x86 hardware.

But I'tell ya': Mandrake and RedHat can get really slow 'cause they run a lot of services and bg stuff automatically. I you compare the start up of my slack with the startup from Mandrake you'll see what's SLOOOOW MOOOTIOOOON

A properly configured 'any system/OS' will run the fastest.. not necessarily Gentoo.. that's kind of bias'ed thinking, isn't it? Only way to test is to get the same hardware/system setup for multiple machines, then install and configure each system with each distro all the same packages and configuration, compiling, etc. You really think Gentoo would still be the fastest? I'm not saying it will be, but I'm also not saying it isn't.. too hard to tell and too hard to test, unless you have this type of setup to test with... :p

i believe you can set CFLAGS in gentoo (echoing what bulliver said) to optimise the compile for specific features and characteristics of particular processors. i didn't have time to read the list pointed to in the instructions, but they even give a couple of examples in the /etc/make.conf.

as trickykid suggested, only a direct comparison with the same hardware would definitely tell which was faster. but i can say that even using the default processor settings, gentoo sure seems fast on my PII 300/64mb -- faster than slack would be, is my subjective feeling. it definitely boots lightning fast, too, and runs X/flux and many progs without a hitch. so for older systems, i vote for gentoo, i really do think it can be faster.

Well of course, when it comes down to it all of Linux is just the same old foundation of software packages put together onto a CD, floppy, ramdisk, remote server, whatever...

...my point is that you can have a different result for every different joe that wants to put together their own distro...and further...it would be absurd to install a base redhat system, and then recompile it from scratch using the utmost compiler optimizations available, when gentoo does this out of the box so to speak.

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Here's my totally non-scientific personally biased opinion of the relative 'speed' of different distros...to be sure...do not quote this in any sort of article, book, report, or dissertion.

From fastest to slowest...sleekest to cruftiest.
1: gentoo
2: arch linux
3: slack
4: mandrake
5: redhat

feel free to flame me :)

I'd flame you right now but it takes too long with SuSE :-)

rofl! :D

Well configured and optimized Gentoo will be one of the fastest distros. The same goes for any other source-based distro like Lunar or Source Mage. However the question you might ask yourself is, do you know enough to squeeze every last bit of performance out of one of these? Another issue is, your Pentium III with 256MB of RAM makes a pretty weak base for source-based system that will need to compile everything, KDE, Xfree, the lot!
All in all I would say, don't worry about what would be absolutely fastest under optimal conditions - just get Slackware or Arch Linux - either of these will be so close in speed to Gentoo you'll never know the difference without a stopwatch, and will be much easier to run on your hardware.

I'll tell you something right now...

If you use gentoo and you have an Athlon XP 2000+ or better then the flags you want to use are:

It compiles without errors for me (on an Athlon XP 2200+), and it runs faster than ${theFastestThingYouCanThinkOf}

EDIT:

I want to agree with ferrix's post, because it is very non-biased, and more importantly I think it is the most honest words we will read in this thread :)

gentoo is hard to configure...i prefer suse 8.2, it is running on p2, 128 mb ram, 32 mb agp, 40g hdd--cheap huh?