Re: [squid-users] reasonable differences

From: Steve Snyder <swsnyder@dont-contact.us>
Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2004 08:20:39 -0500

On Sunday 19 December 2004 2:58 am, Joe Cooper wrote:
[snip]
> But not by much. I tried out the Intel compiler a couple of years ago,
> with barely measurable (statistically insignificant) results. And
> while I'm sure the Intel compiler has improved in those two years, GCC
> probably has also. And given that the difference between a build with
> no optimization and a build with high optimization is also quite small,
> I don't foresee any compiler improvement being capable of significantly
> altering Squid's performance.

When you've got some free time you might want to try benchmarking again,
with current compiler versions. The Intel compiler (currently v8.1,
Linux version free for non-commerial use) does a pretty good job of
auto-parallizing single-threaded code. GCC is improving, but they still
lag Intel in Pentium4 code generation, sometime greatly.

I've been building Squid with ICC for years (on RedHat/Fedora systems),
and see no downside to it. That is, the use of Intel's compiler/linker
doesn't seem to reduce Squid stability vs. the GCC development tools.

I agree that I/O is generally the bottleneck for Squid, but if you can get
reduced CPU utilization for "free", why not?
Received on Sun Dec 19 2004 - 06:20:42 MST

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