Re: [gentoo-user] is multi-core really worth it?

[Raffaele Belardi <raffaele.belardi@st.com>]

Wols Lists wrote:
>>
>> If a tmpfs fills up, the excess gets swapped out, but with 32GB RAM here I
>> haven't yet seen any swap used at all - not even in an emerge -e world.
> 
> Same here. Note that tmpfs defaults to half ram, so that would give you
> a 16GB /var/tmp/portage. With 16GB ram here, that would probably cause
> things like emerging libreoffice or firefox or gcc to abort.

Not really, libreoffice and gcc compile slowly but fine here with 3Gb RAM and 3Gb
spin-disk swap, and using PORTAGE_NICENESS=19 the system is still usable (rebuilding world
for the profile switch right now). That's with an LXDE desktop, Gnome3 survived only a few
months, _that_ was really unusable.

$ free
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:        3102960     1316120      964848      370488      821992     1123260
Swap:       3076344       91648     2984696

$ df
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs           304M  1.9M  302M   1% /run
none            1.5G     0  1.5G   0% /dev/shm

$ eix -I libreoffice
[I] app-office/libreoffice
     Available versions:  5.4.2.2 (~)5.4.3.2
     Installed versions:  5.4.3.2

$ gcc-config -l
 [1] i686-pc-linux-gnu-7.2.0 *

$ qlop -gH libreoffice | tail -n 2
libreoffice: Wed Nov 22 18:13:17 2017: 12 hours, 37 minutes, 9 seconds
libreoffice: 13 times

$ qlop -gH gcc | tail -n 2
gcc: Mon Dec  4 21:50:26 2017: 3 hours, 9 minutes, 7 seconds
gcc: 80 times

$ uname -a
Linux ws2912 4.14.0-gentoo #1 SMP Fri Nov 17 09:31:56 CET 2017 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4
CPU 3.40GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux