GCC 4.7 Link-Time Optimization Performance

The Nero2D benchmark was about 10% faster with the GCC Link-Time Optimization "-flto" compiler flag.

The PostgreSQL performance barely budged with the LTO support.

Similar to the PostgreSQL server, the Apache server was minimally affected by the GCC LTO feature being enabled.

GCC's Link-Time Optimization support isn't able to improve the performance across the board, but for workloads where it did improve, the speed-ups were very noticeable. The downside to GCC LTO is that compiling the binaries takes significantly longer and goes through a greater amount of RAM, but if the LTO-provided performance improvement is significant, it really is worthwhile. It will be interesting to see how the LTO-optimized Linux kernel performs and other software as more extensive GCC LTO benchmarks are completed.