How much faster...
 

To anyone has successfully recompiled a kernel for their machine or machines

How much faster would you guestimate the system works overall when you the boot from the optimised kernel of course. :rolleyes:

BTW: If you choose over 60% from the options above please tells us what it is.

I'm actually still using the 2.2.19 kernel with my Slackware 8.0 boxes with no kernel recompile. My 400mhz Celeron boots in 27 seconds and my 500mhz around the same. My 800mhz Duron in about 35 seconds, but that's because probably of the services I have loading up most likely. Add another couple of seconds to login and startx when I do..
I just limit the services at bootup that I use. Maybe one day I'll recompile when needed. :D

Herm, how can I optimize my kernel for AMD?

Half Elf:
When you recompile, in the first option after prompt for development options is architecture. In there, (if in menuconfig) highlight i386/i486/i586... and press enter, then arrow down to Athlon/Duron

X11: I am afraid I will be comparing apples to oranges sort of, but when I recompiled my kernel, I optimized for architecture, but also took out module support, and built everything I needed into the kernel. This was on my mobile box, so all I needed was filesystem support, keyboard, and sound. I also disabled startup otptions, and went from around 1 min 20 sec boot to around 25 sec. I can't really calc performance other than time it takes to recompile the kernel. And since there was much less to compile, it obviously went faster.

The only other time I have recompiled my desktop's kernel, I saw a minimal gain in performance. Not quite what I expected, but there was some. Switching to a lighter X, and doing more in Console was what really proved performace gains.

How can people vote higher then 10%. Most kernels that come with a distribution have as many modules as possible. So if you just don't load the modules you don't need you'll have a pretty fast kernel. And since a lot of distribution already come with optimized kernels for at least i586. I doubt a recompile for your architecture will make it more then 10% faster.

Ofcourse if you've got a machine which only does a specific task then you could probably strip the kernel of a great deal of extra stuff.
But I'd say if you get more then 10% after optimizing for most default computers with an average set of hardware, then you are very lucky indeed.

What about switching kernels, would that severely impact performance? Going from a 2.2.x vanilla to 2.4.18 optimized? Or is that like comparing grapes to watermelons?