Re: [gentoo-user] initial compile time

[John Blinka <john.blinka@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 7:41 AM,  <mad.scientist.at.large@tutanota.com> wrote:
> Ok, i'm starting to understand the install instructions, a steeper curve
> than i expected but still way easier than LFS.
> So, on a dual core athlon II 6000 (two cores, 3ghz)  roughly how long will
> stage3 take to compile, roughly?

With emphasis on the "roughly", I seem to recall that it took me
several days to compile everything I wanted on initial system
installation on machines of similar capabilities.  But that includes
significantly more than stage3, with long build time stuff like
firefox, chromium, and libreoffice accounting for at least half that
time.

>
> next month i'll be setting up a compiler farm with 3 other, similiar
> machines which should help, will also be upgrading cpus to 4 or 6 core, and
> have one machine that can upgraded for phenom and one i can update to
> opteron, according to the board makers (it just needs a different bios).
>
> If i had the supporting bios any of my machines could upgrade to nearly any
> AMD socket 2 or 3+ chip

You seem to want to see how fast you can go, and that's certainly an
interesting exercise.  I've been there, too, but over the years have
gradually retreated to a very non-aggressive compile setup.  I've used
distcc, made use of multiple cores, parallel make, etc. but have
abandoned them all over time.  It is quite possible to slow things
down with improper setup, or with a local network with limited
capabilities, so it takes a little time and experimentation to tune
things properly.  And it's possible to speed things up substantially,
too.  However, in my experience, speedups obtained this way can and do
expose bugs in the build process.  For me the personal keyboard time I
invested in fixing things that broke in parallel wasn't worth the
speedups I achieved.  I, too, come from the punchcard and paper tape
era, so even the very cheapest modern cpus run circles around the
multi-million $ parallel supercomputers I used to buy and use.  I now
prefer just starting an emerge, and letting it take its merry old
time.  Gentoo's gotten good enough over the years that this almost
invariably works.  I'm not criticizing your speedup plans - by all
means, have fun - but if you're just starting out in Gentoo, be aware
that these speedups aren't necessarily a slam-dunk.


John Blinka