On Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 3:36 AM, Neil Bothwick <[email protected]> wrote: > > Personally, I wouldn't bother, there is not that much of a gain when > using tmpfs, so if you want to keep all the working files after > compilation, the extra overhead and complexity of copying to hard disk > would make it not worthwhile. Just stick to a spinning disk.
I've found that compiling on tmpfs has a fairly significant performance gain, but you'd completely negate it of you copied everything to a hard drive anyway. When you build on a hard drive the filesystem is going to treat all those intermediate object files with great care and ensure that they aren't lost in the event of a power failure, forcing them to be committed to disk within 30 seconds (typically) and blocking IO when that happens. Then a minute later it is going to go and have to delete all those files it so carefully committed. When you build on tmpfs nothing gets written to your filesystem except for the final output of the build. All those intermediate files are deleted having never blocked your disk IO. However, if your goal is to actually save them anyway, then you might as well just build on disk - moving files doesn't take all that much IO on most filesystems. If your goal is to create tarballs of the saved builds then you're probably still better off building on tmpfs and creating the tarball via a hook or something. -- Rich
