Re: [OT] Re: code bloat [was Re: Semaphore assembly-code bug]

From: Ken Moffat
Date: Sat Oct 30 2004 - 20:11:57 EST


On Sat, 30 Oct 2004, Alan Cox wrote:

> On Sul, 2004-10-31 at 00:20, Lee Revell wrote:
> > I think very few application developers understand the point Linus made
> > - that bigger code IS slower code due to cache misses. If this were
> > widely understood we would be in pretty good shape.
>
> On my laptop both Openoffice and gnome are measurably faster if you
> build the lot with -Os (except a couple of image libs)
>

Depends how much of gnome you use. I used to swear by -Os for
non-toolchain stuff, but in the end I got bitten by gnumeric on x86.
http://bugs.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=128834 is similar, but in my case
opening *any* spreadsheet would cause gnumeric to segfault (gcc-3.3
series). Add in the time spent rebuilding gnome before I found this bug
report, and adding extra parts of gnome just in case I missed something,
and the time to load it is irrelevant. Since then I've had an anecdotal
report that -Os is known to cause problems with gnome. I s'pose people
will say it serves me right for doing my initial testing on ppc which
didn't have this problem ;) The point is that -Os is *much* less tested
than -O2 at the moment.

Ken
--
das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce

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