asterisk users - Nov 2004 - Gentoo and Asterisk - any experiences?

Hi,

In constant search for optimization, a friend told us about his experience
with Gentoo Linux-distro. He claimed that he doubled the performance of his
server by changing to Gentoo from Debian.

Does anyone have any experience with running Asterisk on a Gentoo linux?

/Niels

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Niels Chr. S?rensen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> In constant search for optimization, a friend told us about his experience
> with Gentoo Linux-distro. He claimed that he doubled the performance of his
> server by changing to Gentoo from Debian.
> 
> Does anyone have any experience with running Asterisk on a Gentoo linux?
> 
Your friend is a Gentoo hippie - a lot of people use Gentoo with 
Asterisk (myself included) but you won't see a noticable performance 
difference with Asterisk, if any at all.

(Lets not start a flame war)

-Adam

Niels Chr. S?rensen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> In constant search for optimization, a friend told us about his experience
> with Gentoo Linux-distro. He claimed that he doubled the performance of his
> server by changing to Gentoo from Debian.
> 
> Does anyone have any experience with running Asterisk on a Gentoo linux?
> 
> /Niels
> 
Niels,

	While Gentoo is an excellent distro - it's not really because it is 
built from source.  Doubling the speed of a server?  Not likely, not 
even close.

	Gentoo is very nice because they let you chose every component.  It's 
also a big pain because they let you chose every component.  You have to 
manually emerge EVERYTHING - from a system logger to traceroute and 
other "core" utilities.  It does make things nice for small embedded 
systems.  My distro (AstLinux) is based off of Gentoo because it was 
designed to run on a very small and specific platform - perfect for 
Gentoo.  Portage is also kept reasonable up to date, and USE flags are cool.

	Please note that I am not bashing Gentoo, I really rather like it and 
enjoy it's flexibility.  We really don't need a long flaming distro war 
or anything, as this has happened several times before.  I Just do not 
believe in such substantial claims made by some of the "compile 
everything from source" crowd.

	Your best bet: test it yourself for what you want to run - in this 
case, Asterisk.  Download some stage three's: one for 386 and one for 
your closest processor (or go from stage one and spend more time on it). 
  Read up on optimizations and tweak one out while leaving the other as 
plain old 386 code.  Run some benchmarks (compile Linux kernel, ubench, 
openssl, whatever).  Ditto with Asterisk, and let us all know!

--
Kristian Kielhofner

Doubled?  Sounds vastly overstated IMHO.  I'm sure there's a small
performance gain but most of it you won't notice.

I do enjoy Gentoo's portage system though.  Package managers and I
have never really got along all that well.

Asterisk on Gentoo is no different than other linux systems.  I use
Asterisk stable from CVS rather than the package in portage though. 
If you're familiar with linux, it's straightforward.


On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 04:06:43 +0100, Niels Chr. S?rensen
<niels@powerline.dk> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> In constant search for optimization, a friend told us about his experience
> with Gentoo Linux-distro. He claimed that he doubled the performance of his
> server by changing to Gentoo from Debian.
> 
> Does anyone have any experience with running Asterisk on a Gentoo linux?
> 
> /Niels
> 
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Is it something someone said, was it something someone said?

Niels Chr. S?rensen [niels@powerline.dk] wrote:
> In constant search for optimization, a friend told us about his experience
> with Gentoo Linux-distro. He claimed that he doubled the performance of
> his server by changing to Gentoo from Debian.
>
> Does anyone have any experience with running Asterisk on a Gentoo linux?
>
I use Gentoo - both at home and at work.  You would see a vast
difference between an old 2.4-based distro and Gentoo running 2.6,
but a lot of that would be down to the scheduler in the 2.6 kernel.

If you compile from source then there's no doubt that you'll get a
speed boost.  I doubt that you'd double the performance without other
factors deserving most of the credit.

I do recommend Gentoo GNU/Linux with the 2.6 kernel.  Everything
"just works" (tm) without all the hoops you have to jump though with
other distros - such as Fedora.

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