Daniel Iliev wrote:
Petter Haggholm wrote:
The subject is fairly descriptive. Often -- but not always -- an
emerge will render my system unusable. At a PORTAGE_NICENESS of 3, and
fairly standard MAKEOPTS of "-j2" (on a single-core system), I'm ...
well, rather surprised, confused, and very frustrated. I also can't be
very specific, because I have no real idea of what's causing this, and
the symptoms are very general: The system becomes unresponsive, the
mouse will move but with enough of a lag that physically moving it may
not cause a cursor movement for the next 30 seconds or so, clicking a
taskbar window may not have an effect at all; sometimes I can't even
ssh into the system from my other computer (to kill the emerge)
because it's slow enough that the ssh daemon times out my login
attempt. This never used to happen, I'm not aware of using any weird
settings, I recently rebuilt my entire system with conservative CFLAGS
(-march=athlon64 -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer), and I have an x86
(pentium-m) system with very, very similar settings that exhibits no
such problems.
Any hints, thoughts, or suggestions would be very much welcomed.
System info follows.
1) Does the system go out from this state after some time or you have to
cold reset it?
2) What happens if you put PORTAGE_NICENESS=19, MAKEOPTS of "-j2 -l1" ?
l5 (small "L", not the number "one"), means "loadavg=<1" If loadavg goes
up to 1 make waits this level to drop before continuing its job
3) Is DMA enabled for your HDD(s)? (hdparm -d1 /dev/xxx)?
4) Have you done any overclocking?
1) It does eventually, but it can take a long time. If I have work to
do, I generally can't afford to outwait it. If I run an overnight build,
the system will be fine in the morning, but some apps will typically
have died (killed by GNOME for not responding? I don't know; usually
Thunderbird will die, and sometimes Firefox as well -- thank heavens for
Tab Mix Plus and session crash recovery.
2) I did not know of make's -l option, but -l1 seems like a very
reasonable setting -- I will try that when I don't need to be working
(hopefully later tonight) and see what it does for me. Thanks!
3) Yep, both hard drives have DMA enabled.
4) Not an overclocker; I value stability much higher than performance.
Without having tried it yet -- I need to finish some work first -- I'm
curious about the MAKEOPTS thing, especially -j?. The other reply (so
far) in this thread suggests -j1 and asserts that "[-j2] has no sense
anyway, if you have no multicore or don't use distcc...". This is in
contrast to all the recommended settings I have seen so far -- standard
procedure seems to be -j$(no. cores+1), I presume so that one make
process can do some CPU work while the other is I/O bound? I suppose one
could keep the system more responsive at the cost of longer compiles by
running only one make process, but I have never heard of anyone else
having problems with -j2 on a single-core system ...
(In the hope that you're reading this, too, Pawel -- I don't think I
need to spam the list with an extra reply to so short an email -- I
don't use KDE at all, so the kdeenablefinal flag doesn't really matter
anymore; it's a leftover from a time long gone when I used some packages
that pulled in KDE dependencies. I do use gcc 4[.1.1[-r1]], of course,
but it's working fine with -j2 on my [x86] server and [x86] laptop.)
--
Petter Häggholm
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