“Over the last year I have run a server using the Linux flavor
Gentoo. While most of the servers I deal with these days run
FreeBSD (WireLoad’s servers included), I was curious about what
speed I could get out of old hardware with Gentoo. Gentoo is a
system built to make it easy to compile every little piece of
software in the system with the biggest and baddest gcc flags
imaginable for your particular hardware. In theory this should lead
to a faster system.“The experience has been a bit of a mixed bag. There are things
I really like about Gentoo: the package management, USE flags and
the sophisticated dependencies system. But unfortunately the
drawbacks are severe for a server setting…”