From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org ([208.92.234.80] helo=lists.gentoo.org) by finch.gentoo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1Meu1X-00056b-IN for garchives@archives.gentoo.org; Sat, 22 Aug 2009 17:05:03 +0000 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with SMTP id CA349E038D; Sat, 22 Aug 2009 17:05:01 +0000 (UTC) Received: from randymail-a8.g.dreamhost.com (caiajhbdcbbj.dreamhost.com [208.97.132.119]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AF45FE038D for ; Sat, 22 Aug 2009 17:05:01 +0000 (UTC) Received: from quan (unknown [76.10.130.2]) by randymail-a8.g.dreamhost.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id C408DAEAFF for ; Sat, 22 Aug 2009 10:05:00 -0700 (PDT) From: "James Homuth" To: References: <35d301ca2280$142ecc50$6400a8c0@quan> Subject: RE: [gentoo-user] Re: May be OT: recommended niceness settings for Portage while using Gnome? Date: Sat, 22 Aug 2009 13:06:17 -0400 Message-ID: <3b7c01ca234a$dd9d8340$6400a8c0@quan> Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 11 In-Reply-To: X-MIMEOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.3350 thread-index: Acoih/M4rcSE/Li5Tp6nJFP3A9QEegAwtBsg X-Archives-Salt: 563afed9-41fe-4626-a420-6b439cb7acbe X-Archives-Hash: 1d3170fca439f28d0569babe02afe151 -----Original Message----- From: news [mailto:news@ger.gmane.org] On Behalf Of Nikos Chantziaras Sent: August 21, 2009 1:50 PM To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Subject: [gentoo-user] Re: May be OT: recommended niceness settings for Portage while using Gnome? 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 It does not. I was thinking about upgrading to 2.6.30 anyway, so which switch would I throw to enable it?