Quite a bit of performance. Generally Linux distro (and really all general purpose OS's) need to limit the CPU features they can to a minimum common baseline. Y

Quite a bit of performance. Generally Linux distro (and really all general purpose OS's) need to limit the CPU features they can to a minimum common baseline. Your machine support AVX512 instructions? Those instructions won't be used by the compiler because it's not available everywhere the software will run. By compiling yourself, you can specialize the compilation to the features on the machine. Beyond that the big win over performance even is customization. The most secure code, and the fastest code, is the code that isn't there at all. Do you really need your entire system to support LDAP authentication? Maybe... What about your local email daemon? Do you need that? Because cron does and since your mail daemon also has MySQL support built in, installing cron gets you the MySQL libraries. I don't use it anymore because of the overhead, but there are a lot of performance and security benefits to be had there.