KDE optimizations...

[Jerry McBride]

On Wednesday 11 August 2004 06:04 pm, Tim Wunder wrote:
> On 8/5/2004 5:06 PM, I believe that Jerry McBride wrote:
> > As suggested on the gentoo mailing list... I recompiled KDE 3.2.3 using
> > -Os compiler optimization and my results have been very positive.
> >
> > The most notable change was the decrease in installed footprint. File
> > size went from 348meg to less than 329meg. Load time for the various apps
> > is the second notable performance boost. My seat-o-da-pants-ometer seems
> > like perhaps a %30 decrease in load time. As for execution, no real,
> > notable change.
> >
> > Overall, it's worth looking at.
>
> For grins, I forward your mail to the kde-redhat-users group where Rex
> Deiter (the maintainer) responded thusly, when asked what optimizations,
>
> if any, the kde-redhat team uses to compile KDE:
>  > Standard rpm opts: -O2 -march=i386 -mcpu=i686
>  >
>  > In the past, I had experimented with: -Os -march=i386 -mcpu=i686 and
>  > gave up on that eventually, after I experienced some wierd behavior,
>  > which was possibly optimization/compiler error.
>  >
>  > As a matter of fact, I've found a couple of -Os gcc optimization bugs
>  > (in a couple of non-kde packages), and when I reported them to
>  > redhat, was told that -Os isn't supported really, and should be using
>  > -O2 anyway.
>  >
>  > Since then, I've been of the opinion that the slightly larger binary
>  > size is worth the piece-of-mind (and worrying less about compiler
>  > issues).
>  >
>  > -- Rex
>

Did he mention compiler version or kde version? As for "wierd behavior", did 
he mention exactly what gave him problems?

> Now I have no idea what -Os vs. -O2 means, but I'll be sticking with the
> pre-compiled RPMs of KDE 3.x as supplied by the kde-redhat folks for my
> installs of Fedora Core 2. But, it's linux, do what suits you :-)
>

With Gentoo, installing applications usually means compiling from source. It's 
a finger snap to change compiler switches... if it doesn't work as expected, 
just change the switch and take another stab. RPM's are cool... just be 
careful where you get them.

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