Proebsting's Law

[Dirk Koopman]

I would offer the following observation: 

In a fairly recent test on 5.8.6 I compiled up the perl with a select of
optimisations and then ran a fairly intensive DBI::ODBC + data
conversion program through it with 'time'. This being a 'real world'
application that runs for minutes (sometimes hours) and hammers both the
CPU as well as the network. The options were:-

1. gcc -g
2. gcc -g -O
3. gcc -O
4. gcc -O3
5. gcc -O6

It may surprise you (as it did me) that option 2 was, significantly,
faster that all the others. 

Dirk