On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 9:42 PM, Harry Putnam <[email protected]> wrote: > Alan McKinnon <[email protected]> writes: > >> What do your basics performance tools like top and friends say? See >> what swap usage looks like outside the chroot while the compile is >> running - is it thrashing? What speed are you getting for the hard disk >> from hdparm -t -T? > > Top shows CC taking about 50% or in that vacinity... nothing else of > note is running. But man I've been at this for 3 days, or so.
There's just no way your system is behaving appropriately. Have you ever used the tool 'htop'? It's quite handy for visualizing CPU usage, including CPUs waiting for, e.g. disk I/O. Also, when running "make bzImage" and "make modules", be sure to supply a -j option. On my system (quad-core phenom 9650) I measured the sweet spot as being at -j8 while building mplayer on a tmpfs mount. Any higher or lower led to an increase in time required for the jobs to complete. Also, you might tail -f /var/log/syslog, or poke dmesg from time to time, and run some smart tests; your disk might be on its last legs. -- :wq
