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List:       gentoo-user
Subject:    Re: [gentoo-user] long compiles
From:       Peter Humphrey <peter () prh ! myzen ! co ! uk>
Date:       2023-09-13 11:28:29
Message-ID: 2913082.e9J7NaK4W3 () wstn
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On Tuesday, 12 September 2023 22:08:49 BST Wol wrote:

> There's all sorts of tricks, some work for some people, others work for
> others.

Quite so. Here I have two swap partitions: 8GB priority 20 on NVME and 50GB 
priority 10 on SSD. I've never noticed either of them being used, so I suppose 
I could dispense with the smaller one. When I bought the machine I wanted it 
to be as powerful as I could reasonably justify (to run BOINC projects, making 
my own small contribution to the state of knowlege in astrophysics), so it has 
64 GB RAM in its four slots.

Tmpfs earns its keep here. I don't set limits on it, preferring to let the 
kernel manage it itself. One tmpfs is on /tmp, the other on /var/tmp/portage. 
With all that RAM to play in, swap is rarely used, if ever.

A thought on compiling, which I hope some devs will read: I was tempted to 
push the system hard at first, with load average and jobs as high as I thought 
I could set them. I've come to believe, though, that job control by portage 
and /usr/bin/make is weak at very high loads, because I would usually find that 
a few packages had failed to compile; also that some complex programs were 
sometimes unstable. Therefore I've had to throttle the system to be sure(r) of 
correctness. Seems a waste. Thus:

$ grep '\-j' /etc/portage/make.conf
EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="--jobs=4 --load-average=32 [...]"
MAKEOPTS="-j14"

That 14 will revert to its previous 12 if I find things going bump in the night 
again, or perhaps go up a bit more if not.

-- 
Regards,
Peter.




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