Gentoo Alpha questions

Hello,

I am thinking of moving from Debian to Gentoo on my home server, which
is an Alpha XL-366 (xlt milo image). The machine currently runs Apache2,
ssh, fetchmail and procmail with spamassassin and clamav to filter
unwanted mails, a simple firewall script (iptables, with nat and
masquerading for my networked machines, can be found at
http://www.asgardsrealm.net/linux/firewall/) and acts as a file server
using Samba. I have a few questions to ask of people who have been using
Gentoo on Alpha for a while.

1. I heard that the fact that you can compile everything for your
machine type, with all the necessary optimisations, makes a nice
difference in system speed. How true is it? Can someone with a similar
setup to my own comment on that? I'm especially hoping that Perl will
see a nice speedup, since I do lots of Perl coding in my free time, and
spamassassin is written in Perl too and currently takes about 3-5
seconds per message.

2. Will the transition from Debian to Gentoo be painful? I'm especially
worried about getting everything to work the same as it did on Debian as
fast as possible. As you can see above, the whole home network depends
on this machine...

3. Also, how do you think the transition from apt to portage will be?
I'm wondering if it's similar to apt, in the sense that you can download
updates (new versions) to currently installed software and install them
automatically (compiling as needed, I guess).

Thanks in advance,

________________________________________________
Jean-Sébastien Guay        [email protected]
                  http://whitestar02.webhop.org/



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