On 08/21/2009 07:54 PM, James Homuth wrote:
I just got Gnome set up completely on a 5-year-old laptop with 512 MB of
RAM running on a P4, and am sort of halfway in the middle of playing
with it. In the process, I'm discovering I still need to install a few
things. Just one problem. I emerge said things, and the system flatlines
until such time as the compilation(s) are done--load is currently
sitting at 2.1+. Are there any make.conf settings I can tweak so that I
can still actually use the system while things compile, or would I be
better off setting things to compile, throwing in a movie, and coming
back when they're done? Thanks for any pointers.
Not sure if something changed in recent kernels, but 19 used to be the
most efficient value since processes running at 19 are considered batch
jobs. They get plenty of CPU time due to longer time-slices
(responsiveness suffers, but you don't care about portage being
responsive in the first place, so it's optimal.) So:
PORTAGE_NICENESS=19
Is best. However, also very important is "I/O nice". Setting an ionice
value of "idle" will result in portage not blocking your other
applications whey they need to do disk I/O:
PORTAGE_IONICE_COMMAND="ionice -c 3 -p \${PID}"
This needs a kernel newer than 2.6.16 and it has to be configured to use
the CFQ scheduler. You know if that's the case if this command:
zgrep CFQ /proc/config.gz
says:
CONFIG_IOSCHED_CFQ=y
CONFIG_DEFAULT_CFQ=y
