When I did a stage 1 install of Gentoo the whole process took about 48 hours on my 1.0 Ghz Athlon with 384 megabytes of memory. Granted I don't know a thing about compiler optimization or anything else, but the end result was a computer that was noticeably more responsive than when it had a fresh install of Fedora Core 1. Their site has good info on USE flags and other settings to use.
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