On Thursday, 16 February 2023 12:23:52 GMT Rich Freeman wrote: --->8 Much useful detail.
That all makes perfect sense, and is what I'd assumed, but it's good to have it confirmed. > The load average setting is definitely useful and I would definitely > set it, but when the issue is swapping it doesn't go far enough. Make > has no idea how much memory a gcc process will require. Since that is > the resource likely causing problems it is hard to efficiently max out > your cores without actually accounting for memory use. The best I've > been able to do is just set things conservatively so it never gets out > of control, and underutilizes CPU in the process. Often it is only > parts of a build that even have issues - something big like chromium > might have 10,000 tasks that would run fine with -j16 or whatever, but > then there is this one part where the jobs all want a ton of RAM and > you need to run just that one part at a lower setting. I've just looked at 'man make', from which it's clear that -j = --jobs, and that both those and --load-average are passed to /usr/bin/make, presumably untouched unless portage itself has identically named variables. So I wonder how feasible it might be for make to incorporate its own checks to ensure that the load average is not exceeded. I am not a programmer (not for at least 35 years, anyway), so I have to leave any such suggestion to the experts. -- Regards, Peter.