Solved Performance binary vs source

P

phalange

I installed FreeBSD 12.1 on a Lenovo T61 and I'm very pleased. Went from a paper weight to a totally usable device.

To save time I built up system with binaries, but now I'm wondering how much better performance I might get building from source. I have to balance against the nasty compile times though. Xorg, Nextcloud, Libreoffice et al. But a T61 is so feeble every little bit helps too.

Any opinions are appreciated.
 
Congratulations on a T61; I still have one at home, and they are (together with the T20) probably the best non-Apple laptop ever made.

Your T61 has a pretty generic 64-bit Intel chip. It has MMX and many of the SSE/SSE2... in the instruction set, but few programs actually make use of that. If you do video transcoding, audio processing it might make a small difference. The binary packages are compiled for high performance, and I know a few programs probe for the presence of optional parts of the instruction set and use them. I would bet that the performance difference is very very small, probably a few percent.

If you really want to compile for it, you might want to set up a big machine and cross-compile the ports on it. I hear that with poudriere cross-compiling is "relatively easy", but I've never done it myself.
 
I use my own build server to build a package repository for all machines in the house with poudriere. But I only do this because I use quite some custom port options to include/exclude features. Getting better performance by building with CPU-specific compiler flags is mostly a myth, at least on X86(_64). Only very specialized software could ever gain performance that is at least measurable.

In short: if you're happy with the default port options, use the packages from the official repo.
 
By x86_64, for memory footprint you'll have like 1~20% of better memory footprint, for CPU will depends a lot of the scenario, usually you will not notice. Some applications can benefit of those optimizations, but you can just compile then alone.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top