You "will just use the suse packages on the fedora installation"???? Muahahahahhah - No wonder your sh1+t don't work, man!!! :-) You gotta get down and dirty promiscuously up close and personal with compiling from source.

Across our workstations, but most importantly- on our development and application servers- we do minimal distro deployment (just the main stuff for the os, X11 gui, etc). And the rest from source. Screw the packages- they always do something stupid. Yum is great for little things like web browsers, image applications, whatever. Little things. But when you are talking performance - the safest thing is to go get the actual architecture independent source. And compile via the cli. It might be a litte bit of a pain sometimes, but the stuff works. Nothing like having that binary sit on your hardware like butter on bread. And your distro is practically irrelevant.

You gotta get down and dirty promiscuously up close and personal with compiling from source. I've had stuff that felt slow all of a sudden double in speed because I've had the wrong stuff.

Also, check that your yum conf actually is getting the right architecture for your system. If you run the nightly yum, it could cause trouble.

Yes, compiling from source is fun and you can often gain a better performance if you do it right. Actually, my system currently runs at about 50% load, so a few extra percent of performance are not absolutely necessary (but a 10x slowdown would not work). So your suggestions, which might be reasonable for your many workstations, would be out of scale in my case.

Also, no nightly runs of yum, just set up iptables and only allow ssh + http. If there is a security problem with one of these, it will make big tech news and I fix my server easily. Even if it is down for a few days, I will not loose thousands of dollars, so this is a small and acceptable risk.