Why Gentoo Shouldn’t be on Your Server

Over the last year I have run a server using the Linux flavor Gentoo. While most of the servers I deal with these days run FreeBSD (WireLoad’s servers included), I was curious about what speed I could get out of old hardware with Gentoo. Gentoo is a system built to make it easy to compile every little piece of software in the system with the biggest and baddest gcc flags imaginable for your particular hardware. In theory this should lead to a faster system.