I found an way to speed up portage and save some drive space at the same
time....
The first thing I tried... I happened to have some spare room on a scsi
harddrive and simply moved /usr/portage and /var/db to the scsi drive. Then
created links from the scsi pointing back to the original locations of the
two directories. That worked pretty good... Emerge times improved a bit due
to the better I/O of scsi over eide.
The second thing I did was to make use of loop devices. I created two files,
one 77meg and the other 209meg. I created the loops, made them ext2 with 1k
block size and no reserved space for root.. I then ran tune2fs on both
loops,using sparse_super and dir_index. Then mounted them and copied
the /var/db and /usr/portage to the new loop mount points. Once done, I
umounted the loops, ran e2fsck -fD on them to establish the directory hash
and moved the symlinks I made above to point to the two new loops and then
remounted the mount points. Now, /vardb and /usr/portage reside on two
hashed ext2 loop devices....
Sounds like a lot of effort, but it's fun... I ended up with a total savings
of almost 300 meg of hard drive space and using emerge is... well...
improved. It's obviously better, faster, than before.
If anyone is interested, I'll do some real world testing to back up my
efforts. Untill then, yeah... this is worth the effort. I'd do it again and I
plane to on a couple of laptops that I admin and maybe some desktops too...
Cheers...
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Registered Linux User Number 185956
FSF Associate Member number 2340 since 05/20/2004
Join me in chat at #linux-users on irc.freenode.net
Buy an Xbox for $149.00, run linux on it and Microsoft loses $150.00!
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