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This is a very well written article about Gentoo and it's use in production environments. However, the author takes the opportunity to discuss some of Gentoo's more appealing features. If you have EVER been curious about Gentoo, read this enlightening composition.
You might think of Gentoo as a bleeding-edge distribution for development workstations, but the simple packaging system can make it a good choice for any production system that needs to stay up to date.
I have a confession to make. I use Gentoo Linux. My colleagues at the various Linux User Group meetings I attend think I'm nuts. Everyone knows that Gentoo is a source-based Linux distribution. Gentoo's reputation (in large measure pushed by the people who develop the distribution) is that it's for people who want super crazy optimizations, and it really is suitable only for those who use desktops. In truth, Gentoo is ideal for a whole bunch of other, unexpected, reasons. Much to my surprise, people actually are using Gentoo in production environments for these very reasons.
Speed
Because there is binary compatibility across all the descendants of the original i386 processor, the other Linux distributions (not to mention everyone writing software for Microsoft Windows) can ship prepackaged binary versions of their software compiled for the generic i386 platform and take advantage of the fact that it'll work everywhere. The other side of this is that these distributions are unable to take advantage of any new optimizations your fancy CPU might offer, which is a pity.
Gentoo is a built-from-source distribution; however, you are able to specify compiler flags to be used when building software for your system. GCC in particular allows one to specify the kind of CPU on which the code will run. By specifying the processor type, such as Intel Pentium III or AMD Athlon Thunderbird, the compiler is able to generate processor-specific code that, in theory, results in better, faster machine code.
Is a Gentoo system faster? Anecdotal evidence is mixed. It seems that a Gentoo system runs somewhat faster than an identically configured system running one of the more popular distributions. But, any minor performance advantage is squandered completely if the system is not installed, configured and tuned correctly. Because many of us don't know how to do that, and because Gentoo offers so much latitude to do your own thing, it's easy to lose the benefits of slightly faster programs if you do something silly.
So, from a speed perspective, it really doesn't matter whether you use a build-it-from-source distribution or a binary-package distribution. If improved speed is not a reason to use Gentoo, why would you want this built-from-source thing? Full article from the LinuxJournal
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