Re: [gentoo-user] Howto speed up compilations

[Colin <signofzeta@gmail.com>]

Neil Bothwick wrote:

>On Mon, 18 Jul 2005 14:14:41 -0300, Bruno Lustosa wrote:
>
>  
>
>>>A few weeks ago I read in one of the newgroups a way to greatly
>>>decrease compilation times. The author noted that this was
>>>particularly noticable when working with something like OO. The
>>>general jist of it was to create temporary file system in memory and
>>>mount your portage tmpdir there. For the life of me, I can't find
>>>that thread anymore. Does anyone do something similar to this? Are
>>>there noticable gains to be had. I have an Athlon 2800XP and 1 GB ram.
>>>      
>>>
>>I am not sure if this will give a tremendous speedup. Granted, the
>>source files won't need to be read from disk, which is an advantage,
>>however, the file reading time should be very small compared to the
>>time it takes for the compiler to translate the source code into
>>machine code.
>>Also, there's the ammount of memory you will lose, memory that could
>>be used by the compiler. In some cases, gcc can eat very big chunks of
>>memory.
>>    
>>
>
>Not to mention the OOo ebuild needing around 3GB of space in TMPDIR, so
>this approach would only result in the emerge failing quicker.
>  
>
Not if you've got a machine with more than 3 GB of memory.  A dual-proc 
Power Mac G5 can handle up to 8 GB of physical RAM.  If you did this 
trick on one of those, you might see some serious improvement!  But with 
most PC's being limited (by the x86 and motherboard designs) to 2 GB of 
physical RAM, it wouldn't work with large apps.

A good suggestion would be to grab some old computers, Gentoo-ize them, 
network them over 100BaseTX or Gigabit and make a little distcc farm.  
Plus, you can charge people if they want to come over and rent your 
computing power.  (Virginia Tech does that with their "System X," 1,100 
dual-2.3GHz-processor XServe G5's.)  :-)
--
Colin
-- 
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