Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-29 Thread Dale

Alex Schuster wrote:

Dale writes:


   

Some of the widget thingys.  What's with the big eyeballs anyway?
 

They watch :)
No, there's no other purpose. I have at least one instance of XEyes on
my desktop since I found this little application in 1992 when I first
started using a Sun workstation. But it is since some months only that I
had the idea to have multiple ones. Well, that's the nice thing about
plasmids, they stay behind application windows, so the do not get in the
way.

   


I gave the little worm looking thing a try once.  I wasn't much on the 
eyes thing.  I guess I don't like someone looking over my shoulder and 
watching me.  lol






I like KDE to.  I just don't take much time learning all the stuff like
I should.
 

I learnt a lot on the KDE mailing list (which is also a nice one, with
helpful people). Especially about this Akonadi stuff that the new KDEPIM
is using.

   


I subscribe there too.  I just get to a point where things work and I 
tend to leave well enough alone.  :/




For me, desktop 1:  Seamonkey browser

desktop 2:  Seamonkey email

desktop 3:  Konsole with at least two tabs

desktop 5:  Konqueror as root
 

Why this?

   


I use Konqueror for all sorts of things.  I mostly use it to edit config 
files or something like that.  I don't like Dolphin to much.  It's OK 
but just not for me.  Maybe one day.





  I got the
local radar thing loaded up and it uses a good bit.  We are expecting
some storms here today.  Since they are coming from my blind side, I
watch the radar so I don't get wet.  lol
 

Is this a plasmoid? This would be a nice one to have.

   


It runs on a tab on Seamonkey.  It my local radar from weather.gov.


How do you tell KDE that you want a widget thingy on one desktop and not
all of them?  I figured out how to get one that I saw on your screenshot
but it put it on them all.  I only want it on one tho.  I can't seem to
find the magic button.
 

Like Yohan said :)

Though I'd like if plasmoids could also be made sticky, on desktops
and/or activities. Maybe they'll implement this, I think this is on the
list. Or does 4.7 already have this feature?

Wonko

   


I tried that but it messed up my slideshow background.  I guess I would 
have to set it up for each desktop.  I'll just keep using Gkrellm I 
guess.  It works pretty well.


I have not tried the activities thing yet.  I don't really know much 
about it.  I need to find a howto on KDE that is up to date.


Dale

:-)  :-)



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-28 Thread Joost Roeleveld
On Wednesday 27 July 2011 16:35:13 Neil Bothwick wrote:
 On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:52:53 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
   I wonder how effective tmpfs is for PORTAGE_TMPDIR as the builds
   that need a lot of disk space can often require a fair bit of
   memory too, and tmpfs is using it all.
  
  In this last week someone reported doing actually measurements and
  found that using a tmpfs was actually slower.
 
 Yes, but that was Dale and nothing works as it should for him :-O

I did similar tests as well and came to the conclusion that the speed 
difference was minimal. Actually favouring the physical drive.

-- 
Joost



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-28 Thread Neil Bothwick
On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 18:16:35 -0500, Dale wrote:

 Speaking of tmpfs, I should have re-emerged OOo on tmpfs.  It filled up 
 /var and died, just a few minutes before it would have finished.  Oh 
 well, I'll make /var bigger next time.  Maybe a couple more Gbs.  I put 
 that http-replicator on here when I decided to keep my old rig up to 
 date and it just eats up my /var.  I guess I could move http* directory 
 tho.  ^_^

Filling up /var is bad, putting PORTAGE_TMPDIR somewhere less critical is
a good idea. Its own filesystem is best but as you don't use LVM, how
about a directory on that 750GB second drive you have.

Then if you get kernel panics during emerges, you'll know the drive is at
fault :)


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Beware of cover disks bearing upgrades.


signature.asc
Description: PGP signature


Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-28 Thread Kfir Lavi
On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 12:30 AM, Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 5:07 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote:
  Neil Bothwick wrote:
 
  On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:58:28 -0500, Dale wrote:
 
 
  I have 16Gbs here.  It's not like I'm going to run out or anything.  I
 can
  put half on tmpfs and still have 8Gbs left.  That is more than enough to
  compile even OOo with no space problems.
 
  Thoughts?

 This is Gentoo, where all us users are reputed to spend their days
 passing around benchmarks of emerge -e world, right?

 Try it. :)


 --
 :wq

 I would like to jump and say NO, but looking at myself last night, running
emerge -e world in both of my comps ;-)
I guess I need to play more with my child.

I have 8GB and tempfs on /var/tmp. Libreoffice compiled well, but didn't
check the timings.
Kfir


Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-28 Thread Dale

Neil Bothwick wrote:

On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 18:16:35 -0500, Dale wrote:

   

Speaking of tmpfs, I should have re-emerged OOo on tmpfs.  It filled up
/var and died, just a few minutes before it would have finished.  Oh
well, I'll make /var bigger next time.  Maybe a couple more Gbs.  I put
that http-replicator on here when I decided to keep my old rig up to
date and it just eats up my /var.  I guess I could move http* directory
tho.  ^_^
 

Filling up /var is bad, putting PORTAGE_TMPDIR somewhere less critical is
a good idea. Its own filesystem is best but as you don't use LVM, how
about a directory on that 750GB second drive you have.

Then if you get kernel panics during emerges, you'll know the drive is at
fault :)


   


Now that's a thought.  Here is the funny thing.  I can copy from the 
drive just fine.  It just doesn't like me writing anything to it.  I 
just can't figure out why it would cause a kernel panic.  It's not like 
the OS is on it or anything.


I did take the sides off my rig last night.  I reseated all the cables.  
I'm going to do some testing here in a bit.  I been upgrading to KDE 
4.7.  Yeppie !!


Dale

:-)  :-)



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-28 Thread Alex Schuster
Dale writes:

 Alex Schuster wrote:
  Dale writes:
  Alex Schuster wrote:
  I don't use tmpfs any more, as 8G of RAM is barely enough to run
  KDE here.
  
  I run KDE here and it uses less than 1Gbs all the time.  Most of the
  time it hovers around 1Gb with a lot of junk open.  If your used
  8Gbs, you got a lot running or something.  o_O
  
  I'm using 4.5G right now according to free -m (using the -/+
  buffers/cache entry). 550M for a Windows VM, 355M for Kontact, 350M
  for my TV-Browser application, 200M for Firefox, incredible 165M for
  a Chromium instance, 155M plasma-desktop. Oh, there's an emerge -a
  command waiting for me to confirm it should run, 155M. virtuoso-t
  neds 150M, the same goes for Amarok, and kwin is at 140 now. The rest
  is mainly more Chromium and Konqueror processes, X, akonadi_nepomuk,
  apache2, kmymoney, the rest is less then 65M each.
  
  The system even starts swapping from time to time. 6G was not enough,
  things are much better now that I have 8G. With 4, it became unusable
  after 1-2 days of being logged into KDE.

 Jeez, I thought I used the kitchen sink here at times.  The better
 question may be, what don't you have running?  LOL

I made some screenshots [*] after I started with an empty .kde4 directory 
one week ago. They show what is started automatically when I log into KDE, 
well, except for the last desktop where I fired up a browser for online 
banking.

Desktop 1: Administration stuff. A Konsole with a root shell and a normal 
shell, and another spare one. Some system info and logging plasmoids.

Desktop 2: Multimedia. Amarok, a folder plasmoid with my images. A Dolphin 
with two tabs showing my music and video files, both tabs have two views. A 
Konsole window is grouped to the Dolphin window, I use it mainly for 
downloading videos with my download script, which is a wrapper for youtube-
dl but does a little more. BTW, I added it to the 'Open with...' menu in 
Konqueror, but nowadays I write 'mydl' in this shell and drag the URLs I 
want to download from the browser right into the shell.

Desktop 3: Mail/News/WWW. Kontact, I use the KMail, Akregator and KNode 
components mainly. And two grouped Chromium windows with some tabs.

Desktop 4: Remote. I go here when I administrate remote systems, via ssh in 
a Konsole, RDesktop, or NX. The folder views have shortcuts to start 
NX/Rdesktop/VPN sessions, or Dophins opening FTP locations and such.

Desktop 5: Programming. A big Dolphin grouped to a Konsole with a growing 
number of tabs. Some folder views for stuff I regularly need. Another 
Chromium, showing my Wiki, and more tabs when I need them. When I actually 
do something here, I also have some editor windows open.

Desktop 6: Other. Financial stuff, LibreOffice, and other things that don't 
fit into the other desktops.

All in all, I don't think this is really so much. With KDE uptime, more 
things are running, and I often see no need to close them, because  might 
need them later again. The weird thing is that this has been my attitude for 
long, and before KDE4, I had no problems with this, even with less then 4G 
of RAM. I was using swap then, but it did not matter much, a little delay 
while an application I did not use for a while gets swapped in was okay. But 
now, when swapping starts, it seems to happen constantly. As if important 
stuff were swapped out, that would be needed again immediately.
With the ati-drivers, this was even worse. When I moved to radeon, it was 
much better already.

Wonko

[*] http://www.wonkology.org/comp/desktop/2011-07-24/



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-28 Thread Dale

Alex Schuster wrote:


I made some screenshots [*] after I started with an empty .kde4 directory
one week ago. They show what is started automatically when I log into KDE,
well, except for the last desktop where I fired up a browser for online
banking.

Desktop 1: Administration stuff. A Konsole with a root shell and a normal
shell, and another spare one. Some system info and logging plasmoids.

Desktop 2: Multimedia. Amarok, a folder plasmoid with my images. A Dolphin
with two tabs showing my music and video files, both tabs have two views. A
Konsole window is grouped to the Dolphin window, I use it mainly for
downloading videos with my download script, which is a wrapper for youtube-
dl but does a little more. BTW, I added it to the 'Open with...' menu in
Konqueror, but nowadays I write 'mydl' in this shell and drag the URLs I
want to download from the browser right into the shell.

Desktop 3: Mail/News/WWW. Kontact, I use the KMail, Akregator and KNode
components mainly. And two grouped Chromium windows with some tabs.

Desktop 4: Remote. I go here when I administrate remote systems, via ssh in
a Konsole, RDesktop, or NX. The folder views have shortcuts to start
NX/Rdesktop/VPN sessions, or Dophins opening FTP locations and such.

Desktop 5: Programming. A big Dolphin grouped to a Konsole with a growing
number of tabs. Some folder views for stuff I regularly need. Another
Chromium, showing my Wiki, and more tabs when I need them. When I actually
do something here, I also have some editor windows open.

Desktop 6: Other. Financial stuff, LibreOffice, and other things that don't
fit into the other desktops.

All in all, I don't think this is really so much. With KDE uptime, more
things are running, and I often see no need to close them, because  might
need them later again. The weird thing is that this has been my attitude for
long, and before KDE4, I had no problems with this, even with less then 4G
of RAM. I was using swap then, but it did not matter much, a little delay
while an application I did not use for a while gets swapped in was okay. But
now, when swapping starts, it seems to happen constantly. As if important
stuff were swapped out, that would be needed again immediately.
With the ati-drivers, this was even worse. When I moved to radeon, it was
much better already.

Wonko

[*] http://www.wonkology.org/comp/desktop/2011-07-24/


   


http://www.wonkology.org/comp/desktop/2011-07-24/desktop6.png

You might want to remove that one.  Look closely at the bank screen.

I'm looking closely.  Some things interest me.  I'm still learning about 
KDE4.  ;-)


Dale

:-)  :-)



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-28 Thread Alex Schuster
Dale writes:

 Alex Schuster wrote:

 http://www.wonkology.org/comp/desktop/2011-07-24/desktop6.png
 
 You might want to remove that one.  Look closely at the bank screen.

That's okay, this is not really my account number, although very close :)  
But even if it were, I guess it wouldn't be too much of a security risk.

 I'm looking closely.  Some things interest me.#

Which things?

 I'm still learning about KDE4.  ;-)

Me too :)  If only things were more stable. I'll wait a little and then 
upgrade to 4.7, and then I'll decide if I stay with it. If not, the question 
would be what to use instead, I would miss so many things. I got KDE-
addicted.

Wonko



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-28 Thread Peter Humphrey
On Thursday 28 July 2011 19:14:07 Alex Schuster wrote:

 Desktop 4: Remote. I go here when I administrate remote systems, via ssh
 in a Konsole, RDesktop, or NX. The folder views have shortcuts to start
 NX/Rdesktop/VPN sessions, or Dophins opening FTP locations and such.

Is that Bow Fell (otherwise known as Bowfell) on the horizon, head in 
clouds?

Apart from that, how do you manage with so much clutter? Me, I have one 
application per desktop, apart from sysadmin which has three Konsoles. And 
definitely no desktop icons.

To each his own, of course. It's interesting to see how the other half live.

-- 
Rgds
Peter   Linux Counter number 5290



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-28 Thread Peter Humphrey
On Thursday 28 July 2011 20:06:09 Alex Schuster wrote:

 I'll wait a little and then upgrade to 4.7, and then I'll decide if I stay
 with it. If not, the question would be what to use instead, I would miss
 so many things.

Me too. I'm sure you wouldn't like gnome: it has far too much of the Windows 
arrogance about it (I know what you need better than you do, so just shut up 
and stop complaining).

-- 
Rgds
Peter   Linux Counter number 5290



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-28 Thread Dale

Alex Schuster wrote:

Dale writes:

   

Alex Schuster wrote:
 
   

http://www.wonkology.org/comp/desktop/2011-07-24/desktop6.png

You might want to remove that one.  Look closely at the bank screen.
 

That's okay, this is not really my account number, although very close :)
But even if it were, I guess it wouldn't be too much of a security risk.

   


That's good to hear.  It looked like you had a pretty short password so 
figuring that out wouldn't be to hard I would guess.  Glad you changed 
things tho.  Better to be safe than sorry.  :-)



I'm looking closely.  Some things interest me.#
 

Which things?
   


Some of the widget thingys.  What's with the big eyeballs anyway?

   

I'm still learning about KDE4.  ;-)
 

Me too :)  If only things were more stable. I'll wait a little and then
upgrade to 4.7, and then I'll decide if I stay with it. If not, the question
would be what to use instead, I would miss so many things. I got KDE-
addicted.

Wonko

   


I like KDE to.  I just don't take much time learning all the stuff like 
I should.


For me, desktop 1:  Seamonkey browser

desktop 2:  Seamonkey email

desktop 3:  Konsole with at least two tabs

desktop 5:  Konqueror as root

desktop 6:  Kpat for my card game.

desktop 7:  Konqueror as a user and usually smplayer for watching 
videos, music and such.


desktop 8:  Usually just gkrellm.

desktop 4, 9 and 10 are generally blank.  I use them for whatever I am 
into at the time.  It may be OOo, gtkam, Gimp or any number of other apps.


MemTotal:   16441056 kB
MemFree: 6356592 kB
Buffers:  847064 kB
Cached:  7243384 kB

According to gkrellm I'm actually using 1.1Gbs at the moment.  I got the 
local radar thing loaded up and it uses a good bit.  We are expecting 
some storms here today.  Since they are coming from my blind side, I 
watch the radar so I don't get wet.  lol


How do you tell KDE that you want a widget thingy on one desktop and not 
all of them?  I figured out how to get one that I saw on your screenshot 
but it put it on them all.  I only want it on one tho.  I can't seem to 
find the magic button.


Dale

:-)  :-)



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-28 Thread Dale

Michael Mol wrote:

On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 5:07 PM, Dalerdalek1...@gmail.com  wrote:
   

Neil Bothwick wrote:
 

On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:58:28 -0500, Dale wrote:

   

I have 16Gbs here.  It's not like I'm going to run out or anything.  I can
put half on tmpfs and still have 8Gbs left.  That is more than enough to
compile even OOo with no space problems.

Thoughts?
 

This is Gentoo, where all us users are reputed to spend their days
passing around benchmarks of emerge -e world, right?

Try it. :)

   


Here you go:

Estimated update time: 16 hours, 15 minutes.

I finally got the error out of the way.  Oh,

Packages installed:   1003
Packages in world:115
Packages in system:   45

Dale

:-)  :-)



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-28 Thread Yohan Pereira
On Thursday 28 Jul 2011 14:38:01 Dale wrote:
 How do you tell KDE that you want a widget thingy on one desktop and not all 
of them? 

Settings - workspace behavior - Virtual Desktops - Tick diffrent widgets 
for each desktop

in earlier kde versions when they were trying to figure out what to do with 
activities you could have an activity bound to each desktop and have the same 
effect. 

Kinda like where activities are going .. but its rather rough rite now 
.. 
Compiling 4.7 right now lets hope its better off.
-- 

- Yohan Pereira

A man can do as he will, but not will as he will - Schopenhauer

Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-28 Thread Alex Schuster
Peter Humphrey writes:

 On Thursday 28 July 2011 19:14:07 Alex Schuster wrote:
 
 Desktop 4: Remote. I go here when I administrate remote systems, via ssh
 in a Konsole, RDesktop, or NX. The folder views have shortcuts to start
 NX/Rdesktop/VPN sessions, or Dophins opening FTP locations and such.
 
 Is that Bow Fell (otherwise known as Bowfell) on the horizon, head in 
 clouds?

Probably not. The image file name is citrusdal.jpg, this is the name of
a small town in South Aftica as Wikipedia tells me. It's just one of
dozends images I got from KDE-Look.org, they change every hour. Same for
the 6th desktop, which shows another bunch of images. The others are static.
Not that this is useful in any way, in fact it would be smarter to
choose backgrounds that would not make my semi-transparent Konsoles a
little hard to read, but I wanted a little eye-candy.

 Apart from that, how do you manage with so much clutter? Me, I have one 
 application per desktop, apart from sysadmin which has three Konsoles. And 
 definitely no desktop icons.

Wow, I would need many more desktops then. How many do you have? So you
also use activities? I don't, and I think they don't suit me as I
already havmy things separated on their desktops, but I do like the idea
and am interested in how this develops.

I like it this way, and cluttering is not a problem for me. Well, maybe
I could put Amarok + my MP3 Dolphin on an exra desktop, leaving more
space for movies and images. But then, when I need the space, I simple
double-click Amarok's title bar which makes it roll up so only the title
bar is visible. And sometimes I maximize Amarok vertically or even to
fullscreen.

 To each his own, of course. It's interesting to see how the other half live.

There are who-has-the-best-KDE-dsktop competitions, and I always wonder
why those people only seem to have a single one, with few applications.
If I was to participate, I would have to compose all my desktops into a
large image, but that would be against the rules.

Wonko



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-28 Thread Alan McKinnon
On Thursday, 28 July 2011 22:27:48 Alex Schuster did opine thusly:
 Probably not. The image file name is citrusdal.jpg, this is the name
 of a small town in South Aftica as Wikipedia tells me.

It's a nice town. In season, you can buy the most fantastic oranges 
there that you ever tasted.


-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-28 Thread Peter Humphrey
On Thursday 28 July 2011 21:27:48 Alex Schuster wrote:

 I would need many more desktops then. How many do you have?

Mostly I have six, but when I'm in a major redevelopment phase of my web 
site that goes up to eight.

 So you also use activities? I don't, and I think they don't suit me as I
 already havmy things separated on their desktops, but I do like the idea
 and am interested in how this develops.

No, I don't use activities. If I did, they'd be file management, e-mail, web, 
sys-admin, css development, html editing and maybe one or two others.

 I like it this way, and cluttering is not a problem for me.

So I see. As I said, we all have our own methods.

 There are who-has-the-best-KDE-dsktop competitions, and I always wonder
 why those people only seem to have a single one, with few applications.
 If I was to participate, I would have to compose all my desktops into a
 large image, but that would be against the rules.

I think life's too short for that kind of indulgence.

-- 
Rgds
Peter   Linux Counter 5290, 1994-04-23



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-28 Thread Alex Schuster
Dale writes:

 Alex Schuster wrote:
 Dale writes:

 Alex Schuster wrote:

 http://www.wonkology.org/comp/desktop/2011-07-24/desktop6.png

 You might want to remove that one.  Look closely at the bank screen.
  
 That's okay, this is not really my account number, although very close :)
 But even if it were, I guess it wouldn't be too much of a security risk.
 
 That's good to hear.  It looked like you had a pretty short password so 
 figuring that out wouldn't be to hard I would guess.

Five characters seems to be normal for online banking here. Anyway,
after three failed attempts, the account is locked. I can unlock it by
giving my PIN and a TAN.


 I'm looking closely.  Some things interest me.#
  
 Which things?
 
 Some of the widget thingys.  What's with the big eyeballs anyway?

They watch :)
No, there's no other purpose. I have at least one instance of XEyes on
my desktop since I found this little application in 1992 when I first
started using a Sun workstation. But it is since some months only that I
had the idea to have multiple ones. Well, that's the nice thing about
plasmids, they stay behind application windows, so the do not get in the
way.

 I'm still learning about KDE4.  ;-)
  
 Me too :)  If only things were more stable. I'll wait a little and then
 upgrade to 4.7, and then I'll decide if I stay with it. If not, the question
 would be what to use instead, I would miss so many things. I got KDE-
 addicted.

 I like KDE to.  I just don't take much time learning all the stuff like 
 I should.

I learnt a lot on the KDE mailing list (which is also a nice one, with
helpful people). Especially about this Akonadi stuff that the new KDEPIM
is using.

 For me, desktop 1:  Seamonkey browser
 
 desktop 2:  Seamonkey email
 
 desktop 3:  Konsole with at least two tabs
 
 desktop 5:  Konqueror as root

Why this?

 desktop 6:  Kpat for my card game.
 
 desktop 7:  Konqueror as a user and usually smplayer for watching 
 videos, music and such.
 
 desktop 8:  Usually just gkrellm.
 
 desktop 4, 9 and 10 are generally blank.  I use them for whatever I am 
 into at the time.  It may be OOo, gtkam, Gimp or any number of other apps.

I'm thinking about adding two desktops now.

 MemTotal:   16441056 kB
 MemFree: 6356592 kB
 Buffers:  847064 kB
 Cached:  7243384 kB
 
 According to gkrellm I'm actually using 1.1Gbs at the moment.

It's 3G more here.

  I got the 
 local radar thing loaded up and it uses a good bit.  We are expecting 
 some storms here today.  Since they are coming from my blind side, I 
 watch the radar so I don't get wet.  lol

Is this a plasmoid? This would be a nice one to have.

 How do you tell KDE that you want a widget thingy on one desktop and not 
 all of them?  I figured out how to get one that I saw on your screenshot 
 but it put it on them all.  I only want it on one tho.  I can't seem to 
 find the magic button.

Like Yohan said :)

Though I'd like if plasmoids could also be made sticky, on desktops
and/or activities. Maybe they'll implement this, I think this is on the
list. Or does 4.7 already have this feature?

Wonko



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-28 Thread Bill Kenworthy
On Thu, 2011-07-28 at 15:10 -0500, Dale wrote:
 Michael Mol wrote:
  On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 5:07 PM, Dalerdalek1...@gmail.com  wrote:
 
  Neil Bothwick wrote:
   
  On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:58:28 -0500, Dale wrote:
 
 
  I have 16Gbs here.  It's not like I'm going to run out or anything.  I can
  put half on tmpfs and still have 8Gbs left.  That is more than enough to
  compile even OOo with no space problems.
 
  Thoughts?
   
  This is Gentoo, where all us users are reputed to spend their days
  passing around benchmarks of emerge -e world, right?
 
  Try it. :)
 
 
 
 Here you go:
 
 Estimated update time: 16 hours, 15 minutes.
 
 I finally got the error out of the way.  Oh,
 
 Packages installed:   1003
 Packages in world:115
 Packages in system:   45
 
 Dale
 
 :-)  :-)
 

Old sony vaio laptop with a 1.2G p3m with 1G ram - helped on occasion by
ccache and distcc, and occaisionally hindered by compiling over nfs when
I didnt have enough room - they DO work :)

BillK



bunyip ~ # genlop -t libreoffice
 * app-office/libreoffice

 Thu Jun 23 06:37:55 2011  app-office/libreoffice-3.3.1
   merge time: 12 hours, 34 minutes and 37 seconds.

 Sun Jun 26 06:46:09 2011  app-office/libreoffice-3.3.1
   merge time: 4 hours, 46 minutes and 49 seconds.

 Tue Jun 28 20:43:20 2011  app-office/libreoffice-3.3.2
   merge time: 8 hours and 22 seconds.

bunyip ~ # genlop -t openoffice
 * app-office/openoffice

 Thu Dec 23 08:58:37 2004  app-office/openoffice-1.1.3
   merge time: 7 hours, 25 minutes and 19 seconds.

 Mon Dec 27 12:55:49 2004  app-office/openoffice-1.1.3
   merge time: 14 hours, 58 minutes and 35 seconds.

 Sun Jan 23 05:08:26 2005  app-office/openoffice-1.1.4
   merge time: 11 hours, 29 minutes and 51 seconds.

 Sat Apr 16 21:08:20 2005  app-office/openoffice-1.1.4-r1
   merge time: 8 hours, 54 minutes and 24 seconds.

 Sun Oct  2 18:04:26 2005  app-office/openoffice-1.1.5
   merge time: 7 hours, 15 minutes and 14 seconds.

 Mon Nov  7 21:51:45 2005  app-office/openoffice-2.0.0
   merge time: 14 hours, 2 minutes and 4 seconds.

 Sat Nov 26 13:38:30 2005  app-office/openoffice-2.0.0
   merge time: 11 hours, 45 minutes and 12 seconds.

 Tue Dec 27 14:43:36 2005  app-office/openoffice-2.0.1
   merge time: 6 hours, 59 minutes and 52 seconds.

 Fri Feb 10 08:50:16 2006  app-office/openoffice-2.0.1
   merge time: 14 hours, 54 minutes and 32 seconds.

 Sat Mar 18 11:54:54 2006  app-office/openoffice-2.0.2
   merge time: 1 day, 4 hours, 16 minutes and 42 seconds.

 Sun May  7 06:19:25 2006  app-office/openoffice-2.0.2-r2
   merge time: 17 hours, 5 minutes and 20 seconds.

 Fri Jul  7 13:02:01 2006  app-office/openoffice-2.0.3
   merge time: 18 hours, 41 minutes and 41 seconds.

 Sun Jul 30 16:41:13 2006  app-office/openoffice-2.0.3
   merge time: 1 day, 3 hours, 5 minutes and 23 seconds.

 Sun Nov 12 09:25:03 2006  app-office/openoffice-2.0.4
   merge time: 17 hours, 51 minutes and 13 seconds.

 Mon Jan 15 18:17:10 2007  app-office/openoffice-2.1.0
   merge time: 9 hours, 57 minutes and 12 seconds.

 Mon Jan 29 17:16:27 2007  app-office/openoffice-2.1.0
   merge time: 7 hours, 9 minutes and 42 seconds.

 Thu Feb  8 20:44:18 2007  app-office/openoffice-2.1.0
   merge time: 4 hours, 26 minutes and 32 seconds.

 Sun Feb 11 07:00:42 2007  app-office/openoffice-2.1.0
   merge time: 10 hours, 14 minutes and 2 seconds.

 Sat Mar 24 07:46:43 2007  app-office/openoffice-2.1.0-r1
   merge time: 9 hours, 16 minutes and 37 seconds.

 Sat Apr 21 09:11:55 2007  app-office/openoffice-2.2.0
   merge time: 9 hours, 54 minutes and 28 seconds.

 Sun Jun 17 13:17:49 2007  app-office/openoffice-2.2.1
   merge time: 20 hours, 27 minutes and 20 seconds.

 Sun Sep  2 02:57:47 2007  app-office/openoffice-2.2.1
   merge time: 15 hours, 18 minutes and 38 seconds.

 Sat Sep 22 20:58:39 2007  app-office/openoffice-2.3.0
   merge time: 10 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds.

 Thu Dec  6 13:36:50 2007  app-office/openoffice-2.3.1
   merge time: 18 hours, 46 minutes and 21 seconds.

 Mon Feb  4 05:24:20 2008  app-office/openoffice-2.3.1-r1
   merge time: 7 hours, 43 minutes.

 Thu Feb 14 17:43:52 2008  app-office/openoffice-2.3.1-r1
   merge time: 15 hours, 19 minutes and 5 seconds.

 Tue Apr  8 14:38:39 2008  app-office/openoffice-2.4.0
   merge time: 8 hours, 28 minutes and 39 seconds.

 Thu Apr 24 14:48:21 2008  app-office/openoffice-2.4.0
   merge time: 6 hours, 30 minutes and 17 seconds.

 Fri Jun 20 06:55:22 2008  app-office/openoffice-2.4.1
   merge time: 7 hours, 51 minutes and 57 seconds.

 Thu Sep 11 03:26:56 2008  app-office/openoffice-2.4.1
   merge time: 7 hours, 55 minutes and 6 seconds.

 Sat Sep 20 09:01:10 2008  app-office/openoffice-2.4.1

Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Alexander Puchmayr
Depending on your available ram and swap space, you might want to mount 
/var/tmp/portage as tmpfs. My fstab entry shows

none/var/tmp/portagetmpfs   size=10g,nr_inodes=1m

I have 4GB ram, and the speed benefit especially for open/libre-office is quite 
impressive.

The advantage is, that it
a) uses only as much of memory as is really used
b) you may use mount option -remount to increase the size of the filesystem, 
and add proper swapfiles if you see that you're running out of space (mkswap, 
swapon)

Greetings,
Alex



Am Montag, 25. Juli 2011, 12:02:34 schrieb Mick:
 After some deliberation I've started emerging libreoffice.  It gave the
 usual office suite warnings at the beginning that there isn't enough space
 in /var (I have 5.8G and it was asking for more than 7G+).
 
 Half way through the emerge I noticed that I have only 74M left and is
 going down fast!  O_O
 
 OpenOffice was able to emerge in the past using this partition size without
 a problem.  I've flushed logs and what not to free some space, but I'm
 thinking of extending the partition somehow.  I don't run LVM on this
 machine so that's not a solution for this circumstance.
 
 Is there anything I can do with mount --rbind and could I do this in the
 middle of an emerge?  I have another partition with loads of space in it,
 but it has a different fs on it (reiser4 instead of /var's ext4).




Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Mick
On Wednesday 27 Jul 2011 08:24:37 Alexander Puchmayr wrote:
 Depending on your available ram and swap space, you might want to mount
 /var/tmp/portage as tmpfs. My fstab entry shows
 
 none/var/tmp/portagetmpfs  
 size=10g,nr_inodes=1m
 
 I have 4GB ram, and the speed benefit especially for open/libre-office is
 quite impressive.
 
 The advantage is, that it
 a) uses only as much of memory as is really used
 b) you may use mount option -remount to increase the size of the
 filesystem, and add proper swapfiles if you see that you're running out of
 space (mkswap, swapon)

I also only have 4G of RAM and libreoffice seems to need more than 7-8G of 
/var/tmp/portage to compile and build.  OOo does it in less that 5G.

What will libreoffice do if /var/tmp/portage is a tmpfs?  Start swapping like 
mad?

-- 
Regards,
Mick


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Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Michael Mol
On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 9:23 AM, Mick michaelkintz...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Wednesday 27 Jul 2011 08:24:37 Alexander Puchmayr wrote:
 Depending on your available ram and swap space, you might want to mount
 /var/tmp/portage as tmpfs. My fstab entry shows

 none                    /var/tmp/portage        tmpfs
 size=10g,nr_inodes=1m

 I have 4GB ram, and the speed benefit especially for open/libre-office is
 quite impressive.

 The advantage is, that it
 a) uses only as much of memory as is really used
 b) you may use mount option -remount to increase the size of the
 filesystem, and add proper swapfiles if you see that you're running out of
 space (mkswap, swapon)

 I also only have 4G of RAM and libreoffice seems to need more than 7-8G of
 /var/tmp/portage to compile and build.  OOo does it in less that 5G.

 What will libreoffice do if /var/tmp/portage is a tmpfs?  Start swapping like
 mad?

No; the tmpfs runs out of space, and the build fails. Had that happen
with Thunderbird, and thus ended my usage of tmpfs for /var/tmp. I'll
probably go back to using tmpfs there once I've bumped my machine up
to the motherboard's max of 16GB of RAM.
-- 
:wq



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Peter Humphrey
On Wednesday 27 July 2011 14:29:12 Michael Mol wrote:
 On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 9:23 AM, Mick michaelkintz...@gmail.com wrote:
  What will libreoffice do if /var/tmp/portage is a tmpfs?  Start
  swapping like mad?
 
 No; the tmpfs runs out of space, and the build fails. Had that happen
 with Thunderbird, and thus ended my usage of tmpfs for /var/tmp.

Doesn't do that here. When tmpfs is full it starts being swapped out to the 
swap partition. Perhaps you didn't have any swap at the time.

-- 
Rgds
Peter   Linux Counter number 5290



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Michael Mol
On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 9:41 AM, Peter Humphrey
pe...@humphrey.ukfsn.org wrote:
 On Wednesday 27 July 2011 14:29:12 Michael Mol wrote:
 On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 9:23 AM, Mick michaelkintz...@gmail.com wrote:
  What will libreoffice do if /var/tmp/portage is a tmpfs?  Start
  swapping like mad?

 No; the tmpfs runs out of space, and the build fails. Had that happen
 with Thunderbird, and thus ended my usage of tmpfs for /var/tmp.

 Doesn't do that here. When tmpfs is full it starts being swapped out to the
 swap partition. Perhaps you didn't have any swap at the time.

Possible. With 6-8GB of RAM, I've generally not needed it.

-- 
:wq



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Neil Bothwick
On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 14:41:33 +0100, Peter Humphrey wrote:

 Doesn't do that here. When tmpfs is full it starts being swapped out to
 the swap partition. Perhaps you didn't have any swap at the time.

The default size for a tmpfs filesystem is half the physical RAM, unless
you specify more as a mount option, it will never use significant
amounts of swap.

I wonder how effective tmpfs is for PORTAGE_TMPDIR as the builds that
need a lot of disk space can often require a fair bit of memory too, and
tmpfs is using it all.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Nobody's perfect and since I'm nobody...!


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Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Dale

Neil Bothwick wrote:

On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 14:41:33 +0100, Peter Humphrey wrote:

   

Doesn't do that here. When tmpfs is full it starts being swapped out to
the swap partition. Perhaps you didn't have any swap at the time.
 

The default size for a tmpfs filesystem is half the physical RAM, unless
you specify more as a mount option, it will never use significant
amounts of swap.

I wonder how effective tmpfs is for PORTAGE_TMPDIR as the builds that
need a lot of disk space can often require a fair bit of memory too, and
tmpfs is using it all.


   



I posted this somewhere but anyway.  I tested this with my 16Gbs and 
some fairly good size packages.  Most of them took a little longer to 
compile on tmpfs than it did on the hard drive.  So, putting portage's 
work directory on tmpfs doesn't help a bit.


Dale

:-)  :-)



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Alan McKinnon
On Wednesday 27 July 2011 15:40:03 Neil Bothwick did opine thusly:
 On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 14:41:33 +0100, Peter Humphrey wrote:
  Doesn't do that here. When tmpfs is full it starts being swapped
  out to the swap partition. Perhaps you didn't have any swap at
  the time.
 
 The default size for a tmpfs filesystem is half the physical RAM,
 unless you specify more as a mount option, it will never use
 significant amounts of swap.
 
 I wonder how effective tmpfs is for PORTAGE_TMPDIR as the builds
 that need a lot of disk space can often require a fair bit of
 memory too, and tmpfs is using it all.

In this last week someone reported doing actually measurements and 
found that using a tmpfs was actually slower.


-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Michael Mol
On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 10:40 AM, Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk wrote:
 On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 14:41:33 +0100, Peter Humphrey wrote:

 Doesn't do that here. When tmpfs is full it starts being swapped out to
 the swap partition. Perhaps you didn't have any swap at the time.

 The default size for a tmpfs filesystem is half the physical RAM, unless
 you specify more as a mount option, it will never use significant
 amounts of swap.

 I wonder how effective tmpfs is for PORTAGE_TMPDIR as the builds that
 need a lot of disk space can often require a fair bit of memory too, and
 tmpfs is using it all.

portage (by default) cleans up after itself after each ebuild, so
there's no leakage across ebuilds, but yeah; if you don't have enough
RAM for it, stuffing your files and your active processes in the RAM
won't work. That's a pretty simple concept.

tmpfs for PORTAGE_TMPDIR is great, as long as you have the RAM for it.
When I first started using Gentoo, I did. Lately, builds have gotten
large enough (especially when I added -ggdb to CFLAGS) that I had to
stop using it.

However, I can see an argument for tmpfs to still be useful, even if
you don't have enough RAM for it, but you do have swap space. If you
allow tmpfs to be backed by swap, you can avoid the (unnecessary in
this case) bookkeeping done by normal disk filesystems like
ext{2|3|4}. So long as your swap partition is as fast as the partition
your erstwhile disk filesystem sits on, it'd be a theoretical gain.
(Though if you're using a swap *file* as opposed to a swap partition,
you'd lose that gain. So YMMV.)

With that in mind, I think I'll re-enable tmpfs when I get home, and
set it to act as a 16GB filesystem. I only have 6GB of RAM, but tmpfs
won't consume more RAM than it has data to fill pages, and the use of
swap shouldn't be terrible.

My understanding of tmpfs is that it's implemented as a thin layer on
top of the file page cache, and that as active processes need more
RAM, the file page cache is the first thing to be sacrificed, being
flushed to disk. (Presumably, in the case of tmpfs, 'disk' would be
'swap') So truly active process memory should have no more trouble
remaining in physical RAM than if tmpfs weren't there; if tmpfs
weren't there, the data would still sit in the file cache, but would
have to pass through a filesystem like ext{2|3|4} (or whatever) on its
way to disk.

-- 
:wq



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Michael Mol
On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 10:52 AM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Wednesday 27 July 2011 15:40:03 Neil Bothwick did opine thusly:
 On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 14:41:33 +0100, Peter Humphrey wrote:
  Doesn't do that here. When tmpfs is full it starts being swapped
  out to the swap partition. Perhaps you didn't have any swap at
  the time.

 The default size for a tmpfs filesystem is half the physical RAM,
 unless you specify more as a mount option, it will never use
 significant amounts of swap.

 I wonder how effective tmpfs is for PORTAGE_TMPDIR as the builds
 that need a lot of disk space can often require a fair bit of
 memory too, and tmpfs is using it all.

 In this last week someone reported doing actually measurements and
 found that using a tmpfs was actually slower.

Hm. I wonder why that is; it seems counterintuitive to my
understanding of how tmpfs is implemented wrt the kernel's caching.
But I haven't red up on that in years.

-- 
:wq



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Neil Bothwick
On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:52:53 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:

  I wonder how effective tmpfs is for PORTAGE_TMPDIR as the builds
  that need a lot of disk space can often require a fair bit of
  memory too, and tmpfs is using it all.  
 
 In this last week someone reported doing actually measurements and 
 found that using a tmpfs was actually slower.

Yes, but that was Dale and nothing works as it should for him :-O


-- 
Neil Bothwick

I work with User-Surly Software.


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Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Dale

Neil Bothwick wrote:

On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:52:53 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:

   

I wonder how effective tmpfs is for PORTAGE_TMPDIR as the builds
that need a lot of disk space can often require a fair bit of
memory too, and tmpfs is using it all.
   

In this last week someone reported doing actually measurements and
found that using a tmpfs was actually slower.
 

Yes, but that was Dale and nothing works as it should for him :-O


   


That one did.  Someone on the forums posted the same results.  It 
doesn't make sense but . . . .


I can also say that I done a .35 kernel from scratch and can now 
download videos.  So, I'm working again.  :-P


Dale

:-)  :-)



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Neil Bothwick
On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:58:28 -0500, Dale wrote:

  I wonder how effective tmpfs is for PORTAGE_TMPDIR as the builds
  that need a lot of disk space can often require a fair bit of
  memory too, and tmpfs is using it all.
   
  In this last week someone reported doing actually measurements and
  found that using a tmpfs was actually slower.
 
  Yes, but that was Dale and nothing works as it should for him :-O

 That one did.  Someone on the forums posted the same results.  It 
 doesn't make sense but . . . .

It makes sense because the ramdisk is using memory that would otherwise
be used for compilation and filesystem caches.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

NOTICE:
  --  THE ELEVATORS WILL BE OUT OF ORDER TODAY  --
  (The nearest working elevators are in the building
   across the street.)


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Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Michael Mol
On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 4:44 PM, Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk wrote:
 On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:58:28 -0500, Dale wrote:

  I wonder how effective tmpfs is for PORTAGE_TMPDIR as the builds
  that need a lot of disk space can often require a fair bit of
  memory too, and tmpfs is using it all.
 
  In this last week someone reported doing actually measurements and
  found that using a tmpfs was actually slower.
 
  Yes, but that was Dale and nothing works as it should for him :-O

 That one did.  Someone on the forums posted the same results.  It
 doesn't make sense but . . . .

 It makes sense because the ramdisk is using memory that would otherwise
 be used for compilation and filesystem caches.

tmpfs isn't implemented as a ramdisk, it's implemented as a thin layer
on top of the filesystem cache.

-- 
:wq



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Dale

Neil Bothwick wrote:

On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:58:28 -0500, Dale wrote:

   

I wonder how effective tmpfs is for PORTAGE_TMPDIR as the builds
that need a lot of disk space can often require a fair bit of
memory too, and tmpfs is using it all.

   

In this last week someone reported doing actually measurements and
found that using a tmpfs was actually slower.

 

Yes, but that was Dale and nothing works as it should for him :-O
   
   

That one did.  Someone on the forums posted the same results.  It
doesn't make sense but . . . .
 

It makes sense because the ramdisk is using memory that would otherwise
be used for compilation and filesystem caches.


   


I have 16Gbs here.  It's not like I'm going to run out or anything.  I 
can put half on tmpfs and still have 8Gbs left.  That is more than 
enough to compile even OOo with no space problems.


Thoughts?

Dale

:-)  :-)



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Michael Mol
On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 5:07 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote:
 Neil Bothwick wrote:

 On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:58:28 -0500, Dale wrote:


 I have 16Gbs here.  It's not like I'm going to run out or anything.  I can
 put half on tmpfs and still have 8Gbs left.  That is more than enough to
 compile even OOo with no space problems.

 Thoughts?

This is Gentoo, where all us users are reputed to spend their days
passing around benchmarks of emerge -e world, right?

Try it. :)


-- 
:wq



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Dale

Michael Mol wrote:

On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 5:07 PM, Dalerdalek1...@gmail.com  wrote:
   

Neil Bothwick wrote:
 

On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:58:28 -0500, Dale wrote:

   

I have 16Gbs here.  It's not like I'm going to run out or anything.  I can
put half on tmpfs and still have 8Gbs left.  That is more than enough to
compile even OOo with no space problems.

Thoughts?
 

This is Gentoo, where all us users are reputed to spend their days
passing around benchmarks of emerge -e world, right?

Try it. :)


   


Yep, we do that.  Mine is about 12 hours.  I would post it but I got a 
Blocker instead.  I'll work on that and post it later.  lol


Point is, I have more than enough memory to test the theory that putting 
portage's work directory on tmpfs is faster/slower than a hard drive.  I 
tested it and it really didn't make much difference.  Most of the time 
it was slower but a couple times it was faster but only by a few seconds.


I guess drives are just a lot faster nowadays or at least fast enough.  
I dunno.


Dale

:-)  :-)



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Joshua Murphy
On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 5:51 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote:
 Michael Mol wrote:

 On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 5:07 PM, Dalerdalek1...@gmail.com  wrote:


 Neil Bothwick wrote:


 On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:58:28 -0500, Dale wrote:



 I have 16Gbs here.  It's not like I'm going to run out or anything.  I
 can
 put half on tmpfs and still have 8Gbs left.  That is more than enough to
 compile even OOo with no space problems.

 Thoughts?


 This is Gentoo, where all us users are reputed to spend their days
 passing around benchmarks of emerge -e world, right?

 Try it. :)




 Yep, we do that.  Mine is about 12 hours.  I would post it but I got a
 Blocker instead.  I'll work on that and post it later.  lol

 Point is, I have more than enough memory to test the theory that putting
 portage's work directory on tmpfs is faster/slower than a hard drive.  I
 tested it and it really didn't make much difference.  Most of the time it
 was slower but a couple times it was faster but only by a few seconds.

 I guess drives are just a lot faster nowadays or at least fast enough.  I
 dunno.

 Dale

 :-)  :-)



I would hazard a guess here that, rather than it being a benefit from
improvement in drive speeds, it's moreso an improvement in the
kernel's file caching. As I understand it (likely incorrectly) tmpfs
essentially does little more than inject the given file into the
filesystem cache, with a 'keep this here' flag attached to it. As
files are accessed on the disk, they're pulled into the filesystem
cache anyhow, and they stay there as long as they're being used and
there's room to keep them. With tmpfs, every file you put into it
stays until explicitly removed, wheras letting the kernel handle the
selected list of files in the cache only keeps the ones the kernel
feels are worth keeping. I am curious, though, whether *not* using
-pipe will actually improve performance when building in tmpfs, as
you're already sidestepping most of the overhead of creating files
with tmpfs, so piping data rather than using intermediate files just
creates extra memory usage overhead (which, while cheaper than disk
i/o and filesystem metadata updates, is still overhead).

Another likely source of performance loss in using tmpfs over physical
disk to hold the build is that, by design, tmpfs occupies a portion of
the filesystem cache. During a build, every header imported, every
library linked, and every process that runs to make it all come
together gets touched. When you touch files on disk, some or all of
them get pulled into the filesystem cache, so keeping the entire build
tree in the cache may well leave more frequently used files being
dropped from cache to trade back and forth between one another.

Again, all of this comes with a I likely have no idea what I'm
talking about, but it sounds convincing disclaimer.

:-)

-- 
Poison [BLX]
Joshua M. Murphy



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Dale

Joshua Murphy wrote:

On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 5:51 PM, Dalerdalek1...@gmail.com  wrote:
   

Michael Mol wrote:
 

On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 5:07 PM, Dalerdalek1...@gmail.comwrote:

   

Neil Bothwick wrote:

 

On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:58:28 -0500, Dale wrote:


   

I have 16Gbs here.  It's not like I'm going to run out or anything.  I
can
put half on tmpfs and still have 8Gbs left.  That is more than enough to
compile even OOo with no space problems.

Thoughts?

 

This is Gentoo, where all us users are reputed to spend their days
passing around benchmarks of emerge -e world, right?

Try it. :)



   

Yep, we do that.  Mine is about 12 hours.  I would post it but I got a
Blocker instead.  I'll work on that and post it later.  lol

Point is, I have more than enough memory to test the theory that putting
portage's work directory on tmpfs is faster/slower than a hard drive.  I
tested it and it really didn't make much difference.  Most of the time it
was slower but a couple times it was faster but only by a few seconds.

I guess drives are just a lot faster nowadays or at least fast enough.  I
dunno.

Dale

:-)  :-)


 

I would hazard a guess here that, rather than it being a benefit from
improvement in drive speeds, it's moreso an improvement in the
kernel's file caching. As I understand it (likely incorrectly) tmpfs
essentially does little more than inject the given file into the
filesystem cache, with a 'keep this here' flag attached to it. As
files are accessed on the disk, they're pulled into the filesystem
cache anyhow, and they stay there as long as they're being used and
there's room to keep them. With tmpfs, every file you put into it
stays until explicitly removed, wheras letting the kernel handle the
selected list of files in the cache only keeps the ones the kernel
feels are worth keeping. I am curious, though, whether *not* using
-pipe will actually improve performance when building in tmpfs, as
you're already sidestepping most of the overhead of creating files
with tmpfs, so piping data rather than using intermediate files just
creates extra memory usage overhead (which, while cheaper than disk
i/o and filesystem metadata updates, is still overhead).

Another likely source of performance loss in using tmpfs over physical
disk to hold the build is that, by design, tmpfs occupies a portion of
the filesystem cache. During a build, every header imported, every
library linked, and every process that runs to make it all come
together gets touched. When you touch files on disk, some or all of
them get pulled into the filesystem cache, so keeping the entire build
tree in the cache may well leave more frequently used files being
dropped from cache to trade back and forth between one another.

Again, all of this comes with a I likely have no idea what I'm
talking about, but it sounds convincing disclaimer.

:-)

   


Sounds better than my I dunno tho.  LOL

I know it doesn't make much sense tho, at least not based on what 
several others thought would happen way back in the day.  Back then, 
very few people had enough ram to really test this.  Those who did, 
well, it may not be their machine to run the test.  ;-)


I may test this again one day.  All you have to do is create a set and 
emerge it.  Reboot to make sure the cache is cleaned 100%, mount tmpfs 
and emerge the set again.  Compare the times and see what hits the fan, 
theory or reality.  :/


Dale

:-)  :-)



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Neil Bothwick
On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:54:22 -0400, Michael Mol wrote:

  It makes sense because the ramdisk is using memory that would
  otherwise be used for compilation and filesystem caches.  
 
 tmpfs isn't implemented as a ramdisk, it's implemented as a thin layer
 on top of the filesystem cache.

That's true, but it is still a storage device using RAM. The
implementation may be different but it still uses up memory that would
otherwise be available to the system. I stand by my comment, semantics
aside.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Last yur I kudnt spel modjerater now I are won.


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Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Neil Bothwick
On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:07:30 -0500, Dale wrote:

  It makes sense because the ramdisk is using memory that would
  otherwise be used for compilation and filesystem caches.

 I have 16Gbs here.  It's not like I'm going to run out or anything.  I 
 can put half on tmpfs and still have 8Gbs left.  That is more than 
 enough to compile even OOo with no space problems.

I wasn't thinking of systems with that much memory. Like you, I'd expect
your system to be faster, even if not by much, using tmpfs.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but
  that's not why we do it.Richard Feynman


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Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Dale

Neil Bothwick wrote:

On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:07:30 -0500, Dale wrote:

   

It makes sense because the ramdisk is using memory that would
otherwise be used for compilation and filesystem caches.
   
   

I have 16Gbs here.  It's not like I'm going to run out or anything.  I
can put half on tmpfs and still have 8Gbs left.  That is more than
enough to compile even OOo with no space problems.
 

I wasn't thinking of systems with that much memory. Like you, I'd expect
your system to be faster, even if not by much, using tmpfs.


   



That's what I was expecting too.  It is confusing for sure.

Speaking of tmpfs, I should have re-emerged OOo on tmpfs.  It filled up 
/var and died, just a few minutes before it would have finished.  Oh 
well, I'll make /var bigger next time.  Maybe a couple more Gbs.  I put 
that http-replicator on here when I decided to keep my old rig up to 
date and it just eats up my /var.  I guess I could move http* directory 
tho.  ^_^


I really need to figure out this hard drive issue right now tho.  That's 
buggin me a lot.


Dale

:-)  :-)



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Alex Schuster
Dale writes:

 Neil Bothwick wrote:

 I wasn't thinking of systems with that much memory. Like you, I'd expect
 your system to be faster, even if not by much, using tmpfs.

 That's what I was expecting too.  It is confusing for sure.

Years ago, I used tmpfs, and it was slightly faster, but on average only
few seconds in an hou-long emerge.

I don't use tmpfs any more, as 8G of RAM is barely enough to run KDe here.

 Speaking of tmpfs, I should have re-emerged OOo on tmpfs.  It filled up 
 /var and died, just a few minutes before it would have finished.  Oh 
 well, I'll make /var bigger next time.  Maybe a couple more Gbs. 

Well, if you were using LVM, this would take less than a minute:

lvresize -L +2G /dev/myVolumeGroup/myVarVolume
resize2fs /dev/myVolumeGroup/myVarVolume

 I put 
 that http-replicator on here when I decided to keep my old rig up to 
 date and it just eats up my /var.  I guess I could move http* directory 
 tho.  ^_^

Sure, either by changing some config file, or crating a symlink to the
new location.

I have a partition for portage stuff (trees, distfiles, packages,
tmpdir), as I don't like my /var to become full just because I emerge
something large.

Wonko



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Dale

Alex Schuster wrote:

Dale writes:

That's what I was expecting too.  It is confusing for sure.
 

Years ago, I used tmpfs, and it was slightly faster, but on average only
few seconds in an hou-long emerge.

I don't use tmpfs any more, as 8G of RAM is barely enough to run KDe here.

   


I run KDE here and it uses less than 1Gbs all the time.  Most of the 
time it hovers around 1Gb with a lot of junk open.  If your used 8Gbs, 
you got a lot running or something.  o_O




Speaking of tmpfs, I should have re-emerged OOo on tmpfs.  It filled up
/var and died, just a few minutes before it would have finished.  Oh
well, I'll make /var bigger next time.  Maybe a couple more Gbs.
 

Well, if you were using LVM, this would take less than a minute:

lvresize -L +2G /dev/myVolumeGroup/myVarVolume
resize2fs /dev/myVolumeGroup/myVarVolume

   


Yea but I don't use LVM.  I may one day but not today.  I got enough 
drive issues right now without adding another layer to it.




I put
that http-replicator on here when I decided to keep my old rig up to
date and it just eats up my /var.  I guess I could move http* directory
tho.  ^_^
 

Sure, either by changing some config file, or crating a symlink to the
new location.

I have a partition for portage stuff (trees, distfiles, packages,
tmpdir), as I don't like my /var to become full just because I emerge
something large.

Wonko

   


I have a separate /boot, /usr/portage, /home and /var.  I started to 
make /var larger but didn't realize I was going to be using the 
http-replicator thing.  It would be nice to have LVM but that is water 
under the bridge right now.


Dale

:-)  :-)



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Dale

Dale wrote:


I run KDE here and it uses less than 1Gbs all the time.  Most of the 
time it hovers around 1Gb with a lot of junk open.  If your used 8Gbs, 
you got a lot running or something.  o_O


That should read less than 2 Gbs all the time.  I hit the wrong 
button.  lol


Dale

:-)  :-)



Re: Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Alex Schuster
Dale writes:

 Alex Schuster wrote:

  I don't use tmpfs any more, as 8G of RAM is barely enough to run KDe
  here.
 
 I run KDE here and it uses less than 1Gbs all the time.  Most of the
 time it hovers around 1Gb with a lot of junk open.  If your used 8Gbs,
 you got a lot running or something.  o_O

I'm using 4.5G right now according to free -m (using the -/+ buffers/cache 
entry). 550M for a Windows VM, 355M for Kontact, 350M for my TV-Browser 
application, 200M for Firefox, incredible 165M for a Chromium instance, 155M 
plasma-desktop. Oh, there's an emerge -a command waiting for me to confirm 
it should run, 155M. virtuoso-t neds 150M, the same goes for Amarok, and 
kwin is at 140 now. The rest is mainly more Chromium and Konqueror 
processes, X, akonadi_nepomuk, apache2, kmymoney, the rest is less then 65M 
each.

The system even starts swapping from time to time. 6G was not enough, things 
are much better now that I have 8G. With 4, it became unusable after 1-2 
days of being logged into KDE.

  Well, if you were using LVM, this would take less than a minute:
  
  lvresize -L +2G /dev/myVolumeGroup/myVarVolume
  resize2fs /dev/myVolumeGroup/myVarVolume
 
 Yea but I don't use LVM.

I know :)

Wonko



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-27 Thread Dale

Alex Schuster wrote:

Dale writes:

   

Alex Schuster wrote:
 
   

I don't use tmpfs any more, as 8G of RAM is barely enough to run KDe
here.
   

I run KDE here and it uses less than 1Gbs all the time.  Most of the
time it hovers around 1Gb with a lot of junk open.  If your used 8Gbs,
you got a lot running or something.  o_O
 

I'm using 4.5G right now according to free -m (using the -/+ buffers/cache
entry). 550M for a Windows VM, 355M for Kontact, 350M for my TV-Browser
application, 200M for Firefox, incredible 165M for a Chromium instance, 155M
plasma-desktop. Oh, there's an emerge -a command waiting for me to confirm
it should run, 155M. virtuoso-t neds 150M, the same goes for Amarok, and
kwin is at 140 now. The rest is mainly more Chromium and Konqueror
processes, X, akonadi_nepomuk, apache2, kmymoney, the rest is less then 65M
each.

The system even starts swapping from time to time. 6G was not enough, things
are much better now that I have 8G. With 4, it became unusable after 1-2
days of being logged into KDE.

   

Well, if you were using LVM, this would take less than a minute:

lvresize -L +2G /dev/myVolumeGroup/myVarVolume
resize2fs /dev/myVolumeGroup/myVarVolume
   

Yea but I don't use LVM.
 

I know :)

Wonko


   


Jeez, I thought I used the kitchen sink here at times.  The better 
question may be, what don't you have running?  LOL


Dale

:-)  :-)



[gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-25 Thread Mick
After some deliberation I've started emerging libreoffice.  It gave the usual 
office suite warnings at the beginning that there isn't enough space in /var 
(I have 5.8G and it was asking for more than 7G+).

Half way through the emerge I noticed that I have only 74M left and is going 
down fast!  O_O

OpenOffice was able to emerge in the past using this partition size without a 
problem.  I've flushed logs and what not to free some space, but I'm thinking 
of extending the partition somehow.  I don't run LVM on this machine so that's 
not a solution for this circumstance.

Is there anything I can do with mount --rbind and could I do this in the 
middle of an emerge?  I have another partition with loads of space in it, but 
it has a different fs on it (reiser4 instead of /var's ext4).
-- 
Regards,
Mick


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Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-25 Thread YoYo Siska
On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 11:02:34AM +0100, Mick wrote:
 After some deliberation I've started emerging libreoffice.  It gave the usual 
 office suite warnings at the beginning that there isn't enough space in /var 
 (I have 5.8G and it was asking for more than 7G+).
 
 Half way through the emerge I noticed that I have only 74M left and is going 
 down fast!  O_O
 
 OpenOffice was able to emerge in the past using this partition size without a 
 problem.  I've flushed logs and what not to free some space, but I'm thinking 
 of extending the partition somehow.  I don't run LVM on this machine so 
 that's 
 not a solution for this circumstance.
 
 Is there anything I can do with mount --rbind and could I do this in the 
 middle of an emerge?  I have another partition with loads of space in it, but 
 it has a different fs on it (reiser4 instead of /var's ext4).

You can mount --bind  a dir from a large partition to /var/tmp/portage
before an emerge, but you can't do that during a running emerge. However
with a reasonable buildsystem, you could in theory stop the emerge, copy
over the files in /var/tmp/portage to new location (preserving
timestamps) and then try resuming the emerge with FEATURES=keepwork
noclean, though i don't know if that works well with openoffice...

Also you don't have to mount anything to /var/tmp/portage, you can just
change the dir by setting PORTAGE_TMPDIR to a directory on a partition
with enough space (I normally have my DISTDIR, PKGDIR and PORTAGE_TMP set
on a different partition...)

yoyo



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-25 Thread Mick
On Monday 25 Jul 2011 11:24:33 YoYo Siska wrote:
 On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 11:02:34AM +0100, Mick wrote:
  After some deliberation I've started emerging libreoffice.  It gave the
  usual office suite warnings at the beginning that there isn't enough
  space in /var (I have 5.8G and it was asking for more than 7G+).
  
  Half way through the emerge I noticed that I have only 74M left and is
  going down fast!  O_O
  
  OpenOffice was able to emerge in the past using this partition size
  without a problem.  I've flushed logs and what not to free some space,
  but I'm thinking of extending the partition somehow.  I don't run LVM on
  this machine so that's not a solution for this circumstance.
  
  Is there anything I can do with mount --rbind and could I do this in the
  middle of an emerge?  I have another partition with loads of space in it,
  but it has a different fs on it (reiser4 instead of /var's ext4).
 
 You can mount --bind  a dir from a large partition to /var/tmp/portage
 before an emerge, but you can't do that during a running emerge. However
 with a reasonable buildsystem, you could in theory stop the emerge, copy
 over the files in /var/tmp/portage to new location (preserving
 timestamps) and then try resuming the emerge with FEATURES=keepwork
 noclean, though i don't know if that works well with openoffice...
 
 Also you don't have to mount anything to /var/tmp/portage, you can just
 change the dir by setting PORTAGE_TMPDIR to a directory on a partition
 with enough space (I normally have my DISTDIR, PKGDIR and PORTAGE_TMP set
 on a different partition...)

Oh yes!  Of course, PORTAGE_TMPDIR  what was I thinking?!!

Thank you.

I never understood properly how the mount --bind/rbind works.  I understand 
that the original partition content becomes visible on a second partition, but 
I'm not at all sure what happens when the space on the first partition runs 
out?
-- 
Regards,
Mick


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Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-25 Thread Kfir Lavi
On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 1:02 PM, Mick michaelkintz...@gmail.com wrote:

 After some deliberation I've started emerging libreoffice.  It gave the
 usual
 office suite warnings at the beginning that there isn't enough space in
 /var
 (I have 5.8G and it was asking for more than 7G+).

 Half way through the emerge I noticed that I have only 74M left and is
 going
 down fast!  O_O

 OpenOffice was able to emerge in the past using this partition size without
 a
 problem.  I've flushed logs and what not to free some space, but I'm
 thinking
 of extending the partition somehow.  I don't run LVM on this machine so
 that's
 not a solution for this circumstance.

 Is there anything I can do with mount --rbind and could I do this in the
 middle of an emerge?  I have another partition with loads of space in it,
 but
 it has a different fs on it (reiser4 instead of /var's ext4).
 --
 Regards,
 Mick

Copy /var/tmp/portage to the partition that you have space, then use 'bind'
command to mount.

Kfir


Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-25 Thread YoYo Siska
On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 11:40:55AM +0100, Mick wrote:
 On Monday 25 Jul 2011 11:24:33 YoYo Siska wrote:
  On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 11:02:34AM +0100, Mick wrote:
   After some deliberation I've started emerging libreoffice.  It gave the
   usual office suite warnings at the beginning that there isn't enough
   space in /var (I have 5.8G and it was asking for more than 7G+).
   
   Half way through the emerge I noticed that I have only 74M left and is
   going down fast!  O_O
   
   OpenOffice was able to emerge in the past using this partition size
   without a problem.  I've flushed logs and what not to free some space,
   but I'm thinking of extending the partition somehow.  I don't run LVM on
   this machine so that's not a solution for this circumstance.
   
   Is there anything I can do with mount --rbind and could I do this in the
   middle of an emerge?  I have another partition with loads of space in it,
   but it has a different fs on it (reiser4 instead of /var's ext4).
  
  You can mount --bind  a dir from a large partition to /var/tmp/portage
  before an emerge, but you can't do that during a running emerge. However
  with a reasonable buildsystem, you could in theory stop the emerge, copy
  over the files in /var/tmp/portage to new location (preserving
  timestamps) and then try resuming the emerge with FEATURES=keepwork
  noclean, though i don't know if that works well with openoffice...
  
  Also you don't have to mount anything to /var/tmp/portage, you can just
  change the dir by setting PORTAGE_TMPDIR to a directory on a partition
  with enough space (I normally have my DISTDIR, PKGDIR and PORTAGE_TMP set
  on a different partition...)
 
 Oh yes!  Of course, PORTAGE_TMPDIR  what was I thinking?!!
 
 Thank you.
 
 I never understood properly how the mount --bind/rbind works.  I understand 
 that the original partition content becomes visible on a second partition, 
 but 
 I'm not at all sure what happens when the space on the first partition runs 
 out?

Not on a second partition but under another mount point i.e. another
path... When you try to access a file by its filename, the kernel takes
the absolute file name, compares it to all the moutend mount points,
takes the best match and tries to find (create)  the file in that
 filesystem/partition...

Lets say you do something like:

mount /dev/sda1 /  (well... you don't actually do this... ;)
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/sda2
mount --bind /mnt/sda2/bigtmp  /tmp 

Then path /home/yoyo/something is accessing file home/yoyo/something
on partition sda1.

The path /mnt/sda2/somedir/somefile is accessing file somedir/somefile
on partion sda2.

The path /tmp/somedir/somefile is accessing file
bigtmp/somdir/somefile on partition sda2.


The files (and free space) under /mnt/sda2  and /tmp are actually on
partition sda2, everything else is on sda1...


So if sda1 runs out of space (by writing to other places than /mnt/sda2
and /tmp), it doesn't in any any way affect /mnt/sda2 and /tmp which
have their free space from sda2. Conversely if you fill up sda2 by
writing to /tmp, your system partition still has free space ;)


yoyo



Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-25 Thread Mick
On Monday 25 Jul 2011 12:18:34 YoYo Siska wrote:
 On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 11:40:55AM +0100, Mick wrote:

  I never understood properly how the mount --bind/rbind works.  I
  understand that the original partition content becomes visible on a
  second partition, but I'm not at all sure what happens when the space on
  the first partition runs out?
 
 Not on a second partition but under another mount point i.e. another
 path... When you try to access a file by its filename, the kernel takes
 the absolute file name, compares it to all the moutend mount points,
 takes the best match and tries to find (create)  the file in that
  filesystem/partition...
 
 Lets say you do something like:
 
 mount /dev/sda1 /  (well... you don't actually do this... ;)
 mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/sda2
 mount --bind /mnt/sda2/bigtmp  /tmp
 
 Then path /home/yoyo/something is accessing file home/yoyo/something
 on partition sda1.
 
 The path /mnt/sda2/somedir/somefile is accessing file somedir/somefile
 on partion sda2.
 
 The path /tmp/somedir/somefile is accessing file
 bigtmp/somdir/somefile on partition sda2.
 
 
 The files (and free space) under /mnt/sda2  and /tmp are actually on
 partition sda2, everything else is on sda1...
 
 
 So if sda1 runs out of space (by writing to other places than /mnt/sda2
 and /tmp), it doesn't in any any way affect /mnt/sda2 and /tmp which
 have their free space from sda2. Conversely if you fill up sda2 by
 writing to /tmp, your system partition still has free space ;)
 
 
 yoyo

I think I got it.  Thanks!
-- 
Regards,
Mick


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Re: [gentoo-user] Running out of space on /var partition

2011-07-25 Thread Alan McKinnon
On Monday 25 July 2011 11:02:34 Mick did opine thusly:
 After some deliberation I've started emerging libreoffice.  It gave
 the usual office suite warnings at the beginning that there isn't
 enough space in /var (I have 5.8G and it was asking for more than
 7G+).
 
 Half way through the emerge I noticed that I have only 74M left and
 is going down fast!  O_O
 
 OpenOffice was able to emerge in the past using this partition size
 without a problem.  I've flushed logs and what not to free some
 space, but I'm thinking of extending the partition somehow.  I
 don't run LVM on this machine so that's not a solution for this
 circumstance.
 
 Is there anything I can do with mount --rbind and could I do this in
 the middle of an emerge?  I have another partition with loads of
 space in it, but it has a different fs on it (reiser4 instead of
 /var's ext4).

Mount that spare partition at /var/tmp/portage
emerge openoffice
umount that spare partition


-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com