[gentoo-dev] Re: Concerns about WIPE_TMP change [offtopic]

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Stefan de Konink <skinkie@xs4all.nl> posted 47928523.2080203@xs4all.nl,
excerpted below, on  Sun, 20 Jan 2008 00:17:55 +0100:

> ...very offtopic but how are you all compiling stuff like firefox on a
> ram disk. Or is 8GB of ram very cheap suddenly?

Well, tmpfs is swap-backed if necessary.  That's one of its strengths.  
And no, 8 gig of at least registered memory (what my Opterons use) isn't 
cheap -- I paid >$1000 for mine a year or so ago, but it sure is nice, 
combined with a dual dual-core system (Opteron 290s, upgraded ~4 months 
ago from 242s).

MAKEOPTS="-j20 -l12" keeps things from getting too out of hand.  It'll 
sometimes use 3 gigs or so of app memory (and about the same tmpfs it 
appears), but not too bad.  I ran -j (unlimited jobs) for awhile, and 
it's fun to see the jobs climb to several hundred, but even with 16 gigs 
4-way striped swap, the system goes draggy at that and >10 gigs into 
swap.  Keeping it to ~12 jobs means responsiveness stays reasonable, at 
least with the new 2.6.24 user based scheduling and the portage user kept 
to the same or half the share of my regular user.  Swap seldom gets used, 
and if it does, it's only a few megs of the apps I don't use much anyway 
(/proc/sys/vm/swappiness set to 100 so it flushes apps, not cache, to 
swap, as apps and the main system are on raid-6 so only two-way striped 
while swap is 4-way striped).

Nice system to run Gentoo on. =8^)  Using ccache, recompiling the updated 
kde4-svn daily is only ~2 hours or so, during which the system remains 
pleasantly usable. =8^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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