Question

What different methods can be used to compile Perl differently, in such a way that would actually improve the performance of Perl scripts run on that machine? Though outdated, http://dan.corlan.net/bench.html, seems to indicate that different performance results can be achieved by compiling things differently. Is that the case, or am I misunderstanding something?

Are there any performance gains from not using a default Perl package (or one that is installed by default in Linux)?

Answer 1

I never measured this but I was led to believe that perl compiled without threads is 10% faster. I am not sure if this is “on average” or on “certain operations” or if it is true at all.

The perl that comes with most (or all?) Linux distributions was compiled with threads.

Based on this, if you build your own perl without threads it should be faster. Incidentally this is what you get when you compile it with the default flags.

Steffen Schwingon has been doing some performance measurements and wrote about them here:
http://blogs.perl.org/users/steffen_schwigon/2012/01/perlformance.html

It would be nice if made some measurements and showed some results.