On Friday, 12 June 2020 16:17:52 BST Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Jun 2020 22:09:41 -0000 (UTC), Grant Edwards wrote:
> > >> If it's only once or twice a month, it's not worth fussing with.  I
> > >> swear there have been a couple times in the past few months when it
> > >> got updated multiple times within a week...
> > > 
> > > So it's not once or twice a month ;-)
> > > 
> > > Oftentimes, it's a rebuild rather than an update, triggered by one of
> > > its dependencies. Adding two lines to /etc/portage to sets -j2 for
> > > this one ebuild is hardly a fuss and well worth the effort.
> > 
> > The fuss is the experimentation to find out if -j2 is faster than -j1
> > or not.
> 
> In my situation is is not so much about speed but not bringing the system
> to its knees. I found the -j3 was generally acceptable with 8GB, -j2 may
> have been better, but as long as it worked I was happy.
> 
> I run testing on this laptop so updates were more frequent, although I
> now use Chromium from stable to reduce that.

Ahh!  Yes, running Chromium ~amd64 must introduce a whole new world of pain!  
:-)

Have you also tried 'echo bfq > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler' to see if it 
makes a difference?  It seems to have made a positive difference on my systems 
here, especially if they are on spinning disks, with limited RAM.