On 8/21/09, Nikos Chantziaras <rea...@arcor.de> wrote: > However, also very important is "I/O nice". Setting an ionice > value of "idle" will result in portage not blocking your other > applications whey they need to do disk I/O: > > PORTAGE_IONICE_COMMAND="ionice -c 3 -p \${PID}"
Yes, as it is a laptop, it's likely to have a slow 5400 RPM disk. I have a nearly same-spec old laptop (~5.5 yo, P4m 2.2GHz, 256+256MB RAM), but I haven't had much trouble with portage emerges on it. Only when something big is due to in the I/O (lots of swapping due to the small RAM, kernel sources being unpacked, 100+ MB file transfer over from LAN etc) has there been slowness which has been annoying. Given the open nature of OP's question I'm also offering MAKEOPTS="-j1". It's not really that much a "speed optimization" (on the contrary?), but another way to try to keep the disk I/O and CPU to yourself -- even if the compiles will take a bit longer on the background. (And this ionice thing I got to try as well on that old clunker, thanks for the tip!) -- Arttu V.