New != Faster

[Colin Percival]

Tim Daneliuk wrote:
> Old   2 PIII @600Mhz           768K    26M/sec    4.11-stable/SMP   
> 50-60 min
> New   Pent D (2 core)@3.2GHz   2G     50M/sec    6.2-stable/SMP    
> 40-50 min
> Fast  2 Xeon @3GHz             3G    130M/sec    4.11-stable/SMP       
> 8 min
> 
> Is the difference in speed
> attributable to 4.11 being faster than 6.2?

Close.  The difference in speed is due to the compiler in 4.11 being
faster than the compiler in 6.2.  FreeBSD uses the gcc compiler, and
between FreeBSD 4.11 and FreeBSD 6.2 that has been upgraded from 2.9
to 3.4.  The general trend each time gcc is upgraded is that it takes
2x longer to compile code, but produces code which is 5% faster (as a
result of "working harder" to find optimizations).

FreeBSD 6.2 is faster than FreeBSD 4.11 for almost everything except
compiling itself. :-)

Colin Percival