You may also want to take a look at "distcc", with which you can set up 
compiler farms; this can be even combined with "ccache":

     https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Distcc#With_ccache

-Ramon

On 11/09/2023 23:46, Alan McKinnon wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, Sep 11, 2023 at 11:23 PM Michael <confabulate@kintzios.com> wrote:
>
>     On Monday, 11 September 2023 21:21:47 BST Alan McKinnon wrote:
>     > On Mon, Sep 11, 2023 at 10:05 PM Neil Bothwick
>     <neil@digimed.co.uk> wrote:
>     > > On Mon, 11 Sep 2023 21:19:27 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
>     > > > chromium has been building since 10:14, it's now 21:16 and
>     still going
>     > > > so 9 hours at least on this machine to build a browser -
>     almost as bad
>     > > > as openoffice at it's worst (regularly took 12 hours).
>     Nodejs also took
>     > > > a while, but I didn't record time.
>     > >
>     > > Chromium is definitely the worst, and strangely variable. The
>     last few
>     > > compiles have taken between 6 and 14 hours. Since it takes
>     longer than
>     > > everything else to build, it is usually compiling on its own,
>     so parallel
>     > > emerges aren't a factor.
>     > >
>     > > Qtwebengine is also bad, not surprising as it is a cut down
>     Chromium.
>     > > Emerging world with --exclude then timing build to coincide
>     with sleep
>     > > helps, although I haven't quite reached the age where I need
>     14 hours of
>     > > sleep a day.
>     > >
>     > >
>     > > --
>     > > Neil Bothwick
>     > >
>     > > If it isn't broken, I can fix it.
>     >
>     > Yup, that jibes with what I see. Oh well, just means that the
>     need for
>     > overnight compiles did not go away haha
>     >
>     > Thanks to every one else that replied too - everyone said much
>     the same
>     > thing so I figured one replay to rule them all was the best way
>     >
>     >
>     > Alan
>
>     As the old saying goes, "there ain't no substitute to cubic
>     inches".  Moar
>     cores and moar RAM is almost always the solution, but with laptops
>     and older
>     PCs in general overnight builds soon become inevitable.
>     Selectively reducing
>     jobs and adding swap, or for packages like rust placing
>     /var/tmp/portage on
>     the disk becomes necessary.
>
>     A solution I use for older/smaller laptops is to build binaries on
>     a more
>     powerful PC and emerge these in turn on the weaker PCs.
>
>     There's also the option of using bin alternatives where available,
>     e.g.
>     google-chrome, firefox-bin, libreoffice-bin.
>
>     Finally, there is a small scale project to provide systemd based
>     binaries as
>     an alternative to building your own:
>
>     https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Experimental_binary_package_host
>
>
> As it turns out this laptop is the most powerful machine I have 
> available, my large collection of previous work laptops are getting 
> older and older.
>
> Although, I *could* create a ginormous build host on one of the 
> virtualization clusters at work hahaha :-)
>
> That link looks interesting, I'll check it out, thanks!
>
>
> -- 
> Alan McKinnon
> alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

-- 
GPG public key: 5983 98DA 5F4D A464 38FD CF87 155B E264 13E6 99BF