What's better for performance: rack-to-endpoint or rack-to-switch-to-endpoint

If the cabling is done right, there will not be any performance issues.

Signal traveling speed on copper media is approx 2/3 the speed of light. That's 200.000Km/s. Let's just say a few extra hundred meters are not going to matter.

I think option 2 is indeed the best and that's what I have seen deployed just about everywhere I've been.

It will depend on your size. If you only have a hundred or so users imho it would be better to wire things all back to the central patch panel and do your switching from there. This is mainly a security of infrastructure question in my mind as it's a lot easier to lock a comms room and have your switches away from prying hands.

If your talking multiple hundreds of users then wiring them back to floor or department comms rooms which are locked and then trunking the traffic back to your primary comms room.

Whatever you do don't forget to leave enough dark cable to handle redundancy/expansion. You don't want a rat to eat a cable and take out an entire department.

Ultimately you need to decide based on traffic type of your users, budget etc. Managed switches throughout will also make the 2nd option more viable but personally I agree with Antonie in that switching latency is unlikely to be a huge concern.

In a large office I'd always go for option two for the reasons already listed by Antoine and Antitribu however there is another factor to consider, there is a limit to the length of any given cable before signal degradation occurs. If memory serves for Cat5 & Cat6 cable the standard is 100m (of solid core cable) from patch panel to wall point which allows for a 10m (stranded) patch cable at either end.

In reality I've had reliable gigabit speeds from 150m cables but I wouldn't want to go much beyond that.