[gentoo-user] What on Earth is Portage doing for so long?

[gentoo-user] What on Earth is Portage doing for so long?

[Thomas T. Veldhouse]

I see that portage is updating its cache for about 20 minutes these 
days!!!  This is on an Athlon 600MHz box with 384MB PC133.

 >>> Updating Portage cache:   50%

Just trying to do a sync ....

Tom Veldhouse


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Re: [gentoo-user] What on Earth is Portage doing for so long?

[Bruno Lustosa]

On 3/17/06, Thomas T. Veldhouse <veldy@veldy.net> wrote:
> I see that portage is updating its cache for about 20 minutes these
> days!!!  This is on an Athlon 600MHz box with 384MB PC133.
>
>  >>> Updating Portage cache:   50%
>
> Just trying to do a sync ....

Good question :)
But one way to speed this up is to use CDB, so that instead of keeping
cache in separate files, it's all in one, resulting in a *much* faster
cache update.
There are directions here:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_speed_up_portage_with_cdb

HTH

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Bruno Lustosa <bruno@lustosa.net>
http://www.lustosa.net/

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Re: [gentoo-user] What on Earth is Portage doing for so long?

[Thomas T. Veldhouse]

Bruno Lustosa wrote:
> Good question :)
> But one way to speed this up is to use CDB, so that instead of keeping
> cache in separate files, it's all in one, resulting in a *much* faster
> cache update.
> There are directions here:
>
> http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_speed_up_portage_with_cdb
>
>   
Interesting ... and thanks for the tip.  I am concerned about all the 
warnings of breakage though.  I need this on my server, which is my 
production firewall at the moment.  I would hate to have this fail.

Tom Veldhouse



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Re: [gentoo-user] What on Earth is Portage doing for so long?

[Alexander Skwar]

Thomas T. Veldhouse wrote:
> Bruno Lustosa wrote:
>> Good question :)
>> But one way to speed this up is to use CDB, so that instead of keeping
>> cache in separate files, it's all in one, resulting in a *much* faster
>> cache update.
>> There are directions here:
>>
>> http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_speed_up_portage_with_cdb
>>
>>   
> Interesting ... and thanks for the tip.  I am concerned about all the 
> warnings of breakage though.  I need this on my server, which is my 
> production firewall at the moment.  I would hate to have this fail.

Well, you know, in worst case, portage doesn't work anymore.
In this case, you'd just have to revert your changes, and
everything's fine again.

Alexander Skwar
-- 
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Re: [gentoo-user] What on Earth is Portage doing for so long?

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Fri, 17 Mar 2006 15:15:56 +0100 Alexander Skwar
<listen@alexander.skwar.name> wrote:
| Well, you know, in worst case, portage doesn't work anymore.
| In this case, you'd just have to revert your changes, and
| everything's fine again.

No, in the worst case Portage ends up with duff cache data, leading to
utterly inappropriate packages being installed.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Wearer of the shiny hat)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm


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Re: [gentoo-user] What on Earth is Portage doing for so long?

[Mark Knecht]

On 3/17/06, Ciaran McCreesh <ciaranm@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 17 Mar 2006 15:15:56 +0100 Alexander Skwar
> <listen@alexander.skwar.name> wrote:
> | Well, you know, in worst case, portage doesn't work anymore.
> | In this case, you'd just have to revert your changes, and
> | everything's fine again.
>
> No, in the worst case Portage ends up with duff cache data, leading to
> utterly inappropriate packages being installed.
>
> --
> Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Wearer of the shiny hat)

Hi,
   I've been using this cdb hack for so long I'd forgotten that it was
there. If it is backed out is there a standard way to use portage
these days that goes reasonably fast and doesn't have these risks.
Granted, the risks are quite low, I think, but better not to take
risks if not required to.

Thanks,
Mark

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Re: [gentoo-user] What on Earth is Portage doing for so long?

[Andreas Claesson]

On 3/17/06, Thomas T. Veldhouse <veldy@veldy.net> wrote:
> Bruno Lustosa wrote:
> > Good question :)
> > But one way to speed this up is to use CDB, so that instead of keeping
> > cache in separate files, it's all in one, resulting in a *much* faster
> > cache update.
> > There are directions here:
> >
> > http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_speed_up_portage_with_cdb
> >
> >
> Interesting ... and thanks for the tip.  I am concerned about all the
> warnings of breakage though.  I need this on my server, which is my
> production firewall at the moment.  I would hate to have this fail.
>

A safer way is to update to a newer version of portage.
In portage-2.1 the cache update code is rewritten and it is much faster
then before (but maybe not as fast as CDB).

The biggest reason for the slower update now compared to a year ago,
is that the total number of packages in the tree have increased. The old
code did not handle this very well.

Since this is a server, you probably don't use kde. Excluding all kde split
packages from the portage tree will speed things up a lot.
Create an rsync exclude file and add  RSYNC_EXCLUDE="path_to_file" to
your make.conf.  Look in man pages for rsync for details.

/Andreas

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Re: [gentoo-user] What on Earth is Portage doing for so long?

[Daniel da Veiga]

On 3/17/06, Bruno Lustosa <bruno.lists@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/17/06, Thomas T. Veldhouse <veldy@veldy.net> wrote:
> > I see that portage is updating its cache for about 20 minutes these
> > days!!!  This is on an Athlon 600MHz box with 384MB PC133.
> >
> >  >>> Updating Portage cache:   50%
> >
> > Just trying to do a sync ....
>
> Good question :)
> But one way to speed this up is to use CDB, so that instead of keeping
> cache in separate files, it's all in one, resulting in a *much* faster
> cache update.
> There are directions here:
>
> http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_speed_up_portage_with_cdb
>

New versions of portage are using a different approuch on metadata and
cache, after sync'ng, a week later it took like 1 minute to update the
cache with the new version.

My advice, update portage, "emerge --metadata",  wait for it to finish
(yes, will take a LOT of time, your machine is below 1GHz, wich will
slow it even more), but in the end, you'll update much faster. CDB is
just a workaround and you can't use it with the most recent version of
portage.

--
Daniel da Veiga
Computer Operator - RS - Brazil
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Re: [gentoo-user] What on Earth is Portage doing for so long?

[Bo Andresen]

On Friday 17 March 2006 15:02, Bruno Lustosa wrote:
> Good question :)
> But one way to speed this up is to use CDB, so that instead of keeping
> cache in separate files, it's all in one, resulting in a *much* faster
> cache update.
> There are directions here:
>
> http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_speed_up_portage_with_cdb

And if you go back one step you'll find other ways to speed up Portage.
http://gentoo-wiki.com/Index:TIP#Portage_Speed
What I do is keep $PORTDIR and $DISTDIR on seperate partitions. Having a small 
partition for $PORTDIR ensures that all of Portage will be in the same place 
on the harddrive. $DISTDIR is on a separate partition because otherwise it 
wouldn't be a small partition. ;) $PKGDIR is not on a separate partition 
because I don't use it. Also Portage 2.1 (which is not supported by cdb) is 
nice. :)

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Bo Andresen
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