I *think* it should go to user mailing list, forums, or somewhere else where it's not [OT].
On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 06:47 -0400, Dave Nebinger wrote: > So I set PORTAGE_NICENESS to 19 in /etc/make.conf on my primary gentoo > desktop so I could do emerges in the background and still use my box... > [...] > So I'm starting to question how useful PORTAGE_NICENESS actually is... If > the system is pegged under niceness 19 and 0, but 0 completes in 10 minutes, > why would PORTAGE_NICENESS benefit me in any way? nice, renice, PORTAGE_NICENESS (they're all the same) affect the way kernel allocates CPU resources for running processes. Under normal operating conditions, nice'd processes will get less CPU time (with nice -n 19 ~1% of nice -n 0) than remaining nice 0 desktop processes. It is possible to run CPU intensive jobs with 98% of CPU time when other, competing processes are "nice". Basically, kernel will get the nice processes out of the way if something else wants the CPU (not completely, look around kerneltrap.org to see how exactly it works in different schedulers) What probably happened in your case was you run out of RAM. Than, your machine started to use VERY slow swap space to run applications from, and it may render some RAM-hogs (kde, e17, gnome) unresponsive. If you are running an memory limited box, you may consider getting rid of -pipe from CFLAGS, and setting MAKEOPTS="-j1". No niceness would help if your system is waiting for swap space accesses. Or just buy more RAM. Modules are getting ridiculusly cheap compared to prices from last two years. I'd consider extra 128-256M for each thread, you use to emerge stuff from, sufficient. And with linux using memory very efficiently, more won't hurt either (and will likely decrease application startup times significantly). Tomasz
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