I agree with the performance. I did not see a lot with compiling everything in Gentoo, heck I did not even know if I had my flags set right for optimal performance. I went to Gentoo because I liked that I could configure everything as I wanted. At the time I was dealing with the likes of Redhat, but Ubuntu serve me just fine and the updates and installs take seconds.

I speak from the result of much testing on a Xen 4-way Xeon server, the precompiled SSE instruction set linear algebra routines in Ubuntu are fairly close in performance to the natively compiled version.

I used to think there would be performance boosts for floating-point math libraries, since they would be most sensitive to compiler options.

Gentoo was just too painful to maintain for what small improvements in speed that I received. On the other hance, converting my code to use the parallel processors on the Xen servers is giving dramatic performance improvements. Hopefully in the next few years we will have more SMP cores per server, heh heh.

James