I was searching a lot on the internet and couldn't find an exact answer. There are distros like Gentoo (or FreeBSD) which does not come with binaries but only with source code for packages (ports). The majority of distros uses binary backages (debian, etc.). First question: How much speed increase can I expect from compiled package? How much speed increase can I get from real world packages like apache or mysql? i.e. queries per second? Second question: Does binary package means it does not use any CPU instructions that was introduced after first AMD 64bit CPU? With the 32bit packages does it mean that the package will run on 386 and basically does not use most of the modern CPU instructions? Additional info: - I am not talking about desktop, but server environment. - I dont care about compile time - I have more servers, so speed increase more than 15% is worth for using source code packages - Please no flamewars. Thank you very much