Did that and sent the logs to Carl.
Encoding speed is highly dependent on source footage and settings, so the only way to compare benchmarks is to use same footage and settings/metadata.
Also, your T5500 seems to be a Dual-SixcoreHT machine. You should set the number of compute threads to at least 24-32 to maximize performance. For most HT CPUs, it seems some 'overthreading' gives the best overall performance.
It appears it runs slightly better at 32 than at the native 24. Should I try 28?
Sintel (21310 frames)
35:49 (2149 sec) 9,9 fps
Big Buck Bunny (813 frames)
01:11 (71 sec) 11,4 fps
With a barebones Linux, is much more performance to be expected?
Cheers,
Andrew