On a somewhat related topic of desktop performance, recently fedora.us Extras has begun experimenting with -Os rather than the standard -O2 optimization for our firefox & thunderbird packages. So far it seems to be working very well, with noticably smaller binary RPMS and runtime memory footprint of these two very large applications. I asked gcc developers if they had a guess about which -O2 and -Os would be "faster" for large applications like firefox & thunderbird. They generally replied that they have no idea, because compiler optimization is an inexact science. All kinds of other factors come into play like smaller memory footprint (less swapping), smaller code size (maybe better use of CPU cache).
Have there been any past discussions about changing the standard compiler optimization for perhaps FC3?
Well, I think you've described a wonderful project that someone could do ... recompile the desktop packages with -Os and do some timing. That's the only way we'd know whether we should change the optimization flags or not.
Regards, Owen
I just noticed today that the recent FC2 kernels are built with -Os rather than -O2. Just another data point for now.
Warren
