I had this idea around 5.4. It is meant to scale better on multi-core machines compared to, say, standard 5.1. This has been proven also it seems. 5.4 is still in Beta, but testing has shown that scalability is definitively better.

What I wanted to know was how well 5.4 would work on a lower spec box compared to 5.1. One reason for me wanting to test this is that I am currently in my summer house, and I have no multi-core 64-bit machines around. All I have in terms of Linux boxes is an old Dell Laptop with Gentoo on it, all this will as similar setup as possible between 5.1 and 5.4.

So, I download 5.4 sources, as there are no 32-bit Linux binaries yet, and I do a simple configure and make. And.. I fail. Out of the box, some of the inline optimizations in innodb (the config I built with was max-no-ndb) will screw up gcc when using -O3 optimization (OK, I admit, I'm not 100% sure that this is the cause, but it sure looks …