Hello list, I still don't know how this works. I ran a test over the last two days, and the result does not accord with 'man make.conf' nor 'man 1 make'.
First, 'man make.conf' does not state that --load-average, if set, will override --jobs, as it clearly does. Second, the two pages contribute actively to the confusion between the emerge jobs submitted in parallel by portage and the concurrent tasks that may be launched by each of those. The test: I ran 'emerge -e @world' with EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="--jobs=10 --load- average=40 ...". It took 350m46s. Then I ran the same -e with --load-average=40, but no --jobs and no -j. That took 351m21s - 35 seconds longer! What's worse, the load average was controlled at about 72, not 40. I watched it for some time, and even though all three load averages were at 72-75, portage kept on starting more packages. As far as I could see, swap was not touched. The machine has 24 threads and 64GB RAM (not to mention plenty of swap), so how was the 72 figure arrived at? I still don't know how to control the number of simultaneous compilations, short of limiting them to one. -- Regards, Peter.
