[Asterisk-Users] Gentoo and Asterisk - any experiences?

[Kristian Kielhofner]

Niels Chr. Sørensen 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