> Many thanks for this help. > Do you know if this also works if you replace i386 packages with > recompiled i686 ones? If so has anyone actually benchmarked a system > with a standard install vs the same packages recomiled to i686. > The reason I ask is that my requirement for linux is for intensive > number crunching and so to get a 5% to 10% performance > increase would be > sufficient justification for recompiling - on the other hand > no good if > you can't kickstart from it. > cheers > > -- > Geoff Dolman > JDRF/WT Diabetes and Inflammation Laboratory > Cambridge Institute for Medical Research > University of Cambridge > http://www-gene.cimr.cam.ac.uk/todd/ You can replace the i386 packages with i686 packages, but I have never seen any benchmarks that test the difference in speed. Red Hat uses -march=i386 -mcpu=i686, so a lot of the optimization is already there. You might also try using gcc3 or Intel's compiler (icc) to recompile the programs that you use, and benchmark them. Forrest
