Peter Humphrey wrote: > On Monday, 9 December 2019 06:31:08 GMT Dale wrote: >> Howdy, >> >> As some may recall, I upgraded my rig to a 8 core CPU, expanded memory, >> added a hard drive etc etc a while back. All of which made things a bit >> faster. Each core isn't that much faster but the extra cores certainly >> help in most cases. It is a noticeable improvement. There's one thing >> tho that it just doesn't help much on. That thing is the emerge command >> itself. When I run emerge, based on gkrellm etc, it always uses one >> core and that's it. As one knows, emerge can take a while trying to >> figure out the best way to upgrade, especially when something is causing >> a road block and requires a detour. Will portage ever be able to use >> more than one core? I'd suspect that if it could use all available >> cores, it would speed things up quite a bit. It may not be 8 times >> faster in my case but even 4 times faster would be nice, more even >> better. Others that have more cores/threads/whatever could see a even >> larger speed increase. >> >> I'm sure trying to get portage to do things in parallel would be a >> programmers nightmare. It may not even be doable given how the tree is >> done or that the complexity of calculating all the options is just to >> much to run in parallel. Still, does anyone think it will be possible >> at some point? Anyone else think it would be as awesome as I do? >> Anyone know if it is something that is being worked on? I think I read >> on -dev once long ago about this but can't recall details and I'm not >> aware of any movement in that direction. I haven't seen any mention of >> it in a long while now. > Portage does indeed run as many emerge jobs as you have cores, if you let it, > but not the calculation of dependencies. That, as you say, cannot be divided > into pieces to give to separate cores, and I'm sure it never will be. Pity, > because on a slow machine like my 32-bit Atom box, it takes ages. >
The other bad thing is, it seems the clocks on CPUs have pretty much hit a wall. It seems that since they can't make them faster, they just add cores/threads to make them faster by running in parallel. Of course that means emerge will get slower as things get more complicated. Other than a faster core, nothing else is going to make emerge faster it seems. I agree tho, I'd hate to be the programmer trying to make emerge calculate updates in parallel. I've got a full head of hair right now but I wouldn't if it were me trying tho. lol Heck, emerge already does some pretty amazing stuff, despite its cryptic error output at times. :/ It sure would be nice tho. Dale :-) :-)
