Interestingly that's what Arch users always say about their distro... personally though I very rarely take seriously any post containing the phrase "it feels faster". Read it countless times and it always amounted to nothing.
Boot time is irrelevant. A system can take ages to boot and still be faster and more responsive than a system which boots in a flash. Also with gentoo, it would depend on which init system is installed as I believe that with gentoo there is essentially a choice. Startup scripts/daemons also have a bearing on boot time.
What would you do to the kernel to make it faster than a given distribution's generic kernel? You can build a preemptive kernel and increase the tick rate, but it's likely that your kernel is configured that way anyway by your distribution. It's easy enough to grep your kernel config and find out...
You could build a smaller kernel, which won't make a jot of difference on most modern systems, or you can only build the needed LKMs for the target system - which will reduce compile times drastically but also won't do much for performance.
In reality if there are performance issues, then you're better off finding out the root cause and understanding the problem, rather than switching distro and then proclaiming "distro X faster than distro Y".
I, too, have written a tl;dr post that won't add much to the discussion
Well, I ask people about their personal experiences with specific distros because there are seldom "full-featured" synthetic benchmarks/comparisons in this sense (considering the ever growing number distributions lying around)...
And because I simply want to know what people have to say. This is a forum, we're exchanging experience.
Anyway, Arch is obviously faster than Ubuntu on my system, for instance. Doubtlessly. Perhaps in general (who knows for sure?
). Booting is faster, applications start really faster, multitasking is snappier. And my hardware is state-of-the-art. I used Ubuntu for months, not the bloated, mainstream version though. I installed the Minimal CD, picking no DE or extra software, just then I set up whatever would go on my system, manually, via CLI. Still slower than Arch, using the same drivers, window managers and DEs. So... Arch is certainly faster than Ubuntu for me.
Are you familiar with kernel modding? Well, I am not an expert, I know how to apply patches and all, but I am still somewhat far from modifying a whole kernel release on my own. I read from experienced people this practice improves performance considerably, too. This is a very particular subject we won't find accurate information about on the web, thus talking to people who actually get things going is quite valuable.
If you compile software from source with your own hardware, chances are it may run smoother, actually. There's not that much room for variation than there is in video transcoding from one codec to another (always having different results, even on the same hardware), but, indeed, there are sometimes little variations, hardware-dependent, on locally compiled binaries.
I don't see why else people would want to compile all their software from source, unless they changed the code, mostly not the case when running an entirely source-based distribution.
Nobody had mentioned performance issues on this thread hitherto. I am always looking for performance boosts, that's why I asked.
