On Tue, 7 Nov 2006, Peter Gutmann wrote: > "Saqib Ali" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > >I compile a lot of software on my laptop, and I *certainly notice* the > >difference between my office laptop (no encryption) and my travel laptop > >(with FDE). The laptops are exactly the same, with the same image loaded. The > >only difference is the FDE software that is installed on the travel laptop. > > That's because you're doing something that produces worst-case > behaviour. The (obvious) solution is the standard "don't do that, > then". My main development machine builds to a RAM drive, and for > some odd reason I don't notice any disk access latency at all.
I am not sure that compilation is worst case for disk performance: once system compiled the first file, the compiler and most of .h files are in RAM and should not be fetched from disk. Note that RAM of modern computers is large enough to store all the source code of a project (except, maybe, openoffice.org). My guess is that slow compilation is a result of access time misconfiguration: if a filesystem has access time enabled, then each time a file is read, the file system updates access time on disk. A solution is to set noatime option on the filesystem used for compilation. A better approach is to mount tmpfs as /tmp, and build in /tmp (for openoffice.org compilation increase size and number of inodes with size and nr_inodes options). -- Regards, ASK P.S. Probably of interest for disk benchmarker: disk performance depends on which cylinders are used, so if one has two partitions (one near the center and another one near the outer edge of the disk) performance on these partitions can be different. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]