GCC benchmark

Using different GCC/Clang compilers may only benefit certain cpu and program/binary combinations. So benchmarks can vary as you can see from all the linked GCC/Clang benchmarks at CentOS 7.x - Beta Branch - Testing GCC 7.1/7.2 & Clang 4.0.1 SCL Yum Packages.

For Centmin Mod specifically, again depends on cpus I have at my disposable and unfortunately alot are older than Intel Broadwell based. Why that is important as some web hosts have reported E5-1600v4/E-2600 v4 Broadwell having performance regressions compared to the v3 counterparts and from investigations from various folks it's due to some of the programs needing to be recompiled with newer GCC compilers to take advantage of v4 Broadwell's improvements. If you're using distro supplied packages, you won't be able to do that. For Centmin Mod for Nginx and PHP-FPM and Memcached server, optionally you have the choice to choose a newer compiler like GCC 5.3, 6.3, 7.2 and Clang 3.4 and 4.0.1 and eventually GCC 8 and Clang 5/6. So you can pair your compiler choice with your cpu choice

Looking out for cheap Skylake/Kabylake or AMD EPYC/Ryzen based servers to better fully investigate the newer compilers like GCC 7/8 and Clang 5/6. In fact Phoronix just posted a GCC 8 vs Clang 6 AMD EPYC comparison at GCC 8.0 vs. LLVM Clang 6.0 On AMD EPYC - Phoronix

I did do some benchmarks when comparing Caddy vs Centmin Mod Nginx for HTTP/2 HTTPS load testing at SSL - Caddy HTTP/2 server & benchmarks - Part 2



For both Caddy and Nginx using GCC 7.1.1 was performing the best.

 

FYI, for folks curious on how to switch Nginx's compilers used you can check out guide at Nginx - Guide To GCC & Clang Compiler Selection For Nginx Installs

 

From Beta Branch - Testing GCC 8 compiler for Centmin Mod Nginx & PHP-FPM