Duncan wrote:
Now, if you /really/ want to make a difference in portage's speed, consider pointing PORTAGE_TMPDIR at a tmpfs. If you've a decent amount of memory, it'll make a HUGE difference, since all the files it normally creates only temporarily in by default, /var/tmp/portage/* will be created in memory (tmpfs) only. Even with a relatively low amount of memory, say a gig (we're talking amd64 system context here, after all, and a gig has been relatively common since its introduction, not some old 1990s 32-bit x86), where tmpfs may be swapped out in some cases, the shortest lived files should never hit disk (swap in the case of tmpfs) at all. That's a LOT of extreme-latency hard-disk I/O avoided!! If you have some serious memory, 2 gig, 4 gig, higher (I have 8 gig), it's even MORE effective, as only the biggest merges will ever hit disk at all, except of course for the initial PORTDIR/DISTDIR operations and the final qmerge to the live filesystem.
This advice caught my attention since I moved my tmp space to Reiserfs for performance reasons. My knowledge of tmpfs is limited but I think it is a filesystem that uses RAM and can grow and shrink dynamically, right? If I follow this advice, what happens when I compile something like Open Office which allocates 3-4GB in /var/tmp during compilation and I only have 2GB physical RAM in the computer?
Regards Morgan
