On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 11:53 AM, Neil Bothwick <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, 15 Sep 2011 11:26:36 -0700, Mark Knecht wrote: > >> I think you have a specific view that is likely the very best thing to >> do for your situation, what ever that is, be it work, office, server >> farm. I don't know. I'm guessing however, that in your world machines >> are always turned on, burning power, and running cron jobs in those >> environment makes lots of sense. > > Bear in mind I was saying an unattended cron is my reason FOR doing a > separate fetch. > >> In my world, which is just a lowly home user of Linux for nearly 15 >> years now, many of the machines I take care of spend more time turned >> off than on. cron jobs don't work when there's no power applied, and >> while you can let the machine immediately catch up when the machine is >> powered back up, in my world of futures trading I need to control CPU >> and network usage to ensure that both downloads and builds don't >> impact my opportunity to make a trade and hopefully make some money. >> As I write this email I'm currently in my 23rd S&P futures trade of >> the day which at this point is just about 5 hours old. Some of these >> trades take only a few minutes and likely wouldn't execute correctly >> if portage was building KDE. > > That is a rather different usage, certainly to mine and probably to the > OP too. In your situation, where timely and correct updates are so > important, I'd be tempted to build packages in a chroot on a less > important system and do an emerge -ku world when everything was ready and > the time was right. >
I've considered researching that sort of thing a number of times in the past, but in trading I have a 6 1/2 work day where I need the _machine_, but not necessarily me, very focused on doing the trades. All my trades are completely computerized and executed by hardware so I need the network unobstructed and the hardware focused. However, as for me, I'm typically programming new trading code which isn't terribly focused while keeping an eye on the trading program to ensure something hasn't gone haywire. The other 5-6 hours a day that the machine is powered up I'm free to build the box anyway that's being discussed, but I think similar to Paul I prefer to download a few files nearly every day but then only rebuild the machine once a week or so. It's a trade off between having the box fully updated vs an 'it-ain't-broke-so-don't-fix-it sort of attitude. While writing this the 24th trade completed (a winner) and the 25th trade has started. It's a good day when you make money while writing email responses to gentoo-users... :-) - Mark
