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From: Bryan Gardiner <bog@khumba.net>
To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Best file system for portage tree?
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2012 09:20:31 -0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20120310092031.01a02da5@khumba.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAA2qdGWYMk3-6jQJuT1jC0-j4WbvRD9TYFtDdu44OyZuooJMtA@mail.gmail.com>

On Sat, 10 Mar 2012 22:09:26 +0700
Pandu Poluan <pandu@poluan.info> wrote:

> On Mar 10, 2012 8:33 PM, "Alex Schuster" <wonko@wonkology.org> wrote:
> >
> > Hi there!
> >
> > Is there an advantage in putting the portage tree on an extra
> > partition?
> >
> > Currently, I'm using reiserfs, because I read that it is efficient
> > when using many small files. On the other hand I also heard that it
> > tends to get slower with every emerge --sync.
> >
> > Space is no longer an argument in these days, at least for my
> > desktop machine. But I would like to optimize for speed -- emerge
> > -DputnVj @world takes quite a while to calculate, I assume this is
> > because so many ebuild files have to be accessed.
> >
> > Any tips on this? Does it make sense to use a special file system
> > just for the portage tree? What would be best? Would it help to
> > re-create this file system from time to time in case it gets slower
> > with every sync? Or wouldn't I notice a difference if I just used a
> > big ext4 partition for all portage related stuff?
> >
> > Anyone using a compressed RAM file system for that? :)
> >
> 
> This had been my burning question when I was deploying the company's
> production server, and forced me to do some research:
> 
> * reiserfs is amazingly fast for reads, but suffers on simultaneous
> writes
> * reiserfs does not have inode limits
> * reiserfs' notail affects performance greatly depending on the
> nature of the system: I/O-bound (use notail) or CPU-bound (don't use
> notail)
> * reiserfs, if mounted without notail, is very space-efficient
> 
> So, I end up with the following mix:
> 
> * ext2 for /boot
> * reiserfs for /usr/portage and /var/tmp (RAM is at premium; can't use
> tmpfs)
> * ext4 for everything else
> 
> This cocktail has been serving me well. I don't need advanced
> filesystems like ZFS, XFS, or btrfs, because my servers are
> virtualized, and the advanced features (e.g., snapshot) is handled by
> the underlying hypervisor (XenServer) and SAN Storage (we use NetApp).
> 
> Rgds,

That's very close to what I do (though not for the same
extensively-researched reasons :).  I added an extra bit of twiddling
in make.conf:

DISTDIR="/usr/local/distfiles"  # On /.
PKGDIR="/usr/local/packages"  # On /.
PORTDIR="/mnt/portage/gentoo"  # /mnt/portage is reiserfs and has /layman too

This way the requirements for the portage partition grow much more
gradually (changed that due to overflow once), and on the random
chance that reiserfs gets corrupted, I don't lose all my
fetch-restricted distfiles.

- Bryan



  parent reply	other threads:[~2012-03-10 17:23 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 13+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2012-03-10 13:30 [gentoo-user] Best file system for portage tree? Alex Schuster
2012-03-10 14:39 ` Dale
2012-03-10 14:40 ` Florian Philipp
2012-03-10 15:09 ` Pandu Poluan
2012-03-10 15:14   ` Pandu Poluan
2012-03-10 17:20   ` Bryan Gardiner [this message]
2012-03-10 15:35 ` Neil Bothwick
2012-03-10 18:36   ` YoYo Siska
2012-03-10 19:38     ` Neil Bothwick
2012-03-11 22:42     ` Alex Schuster
2012-03-12  9:15     ` José Romildo Malaquias
2012-03-12  9:23       ` Alex Schuster
2012-03-13 12:30         ` YoYo Siska

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