Re: [gentoo-user] long compiles

[Wol <antlists@youngman.org.uk>]

On 11/09/2023 20:46, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> qtwebengine! yes that one took forever also. It also said my 16G of RAM 
> was smaller than the 16G it needed. Weird.
> 
> Anyways I enabled a swapfile and left it to run overnight

16GB physical ram <> 16GB usable ram for the compile ...

I concur with others that tmpfs is the way to go - I don't think my 
system is set up that way just now, but I always have googols of swap 
(twice max physical ram per disk) so I just declare a huge ramdisk for 
compiling on.

My current system has four ram slots, two maxed out with 16GB chips 
each, so that makes 128GB swap partitions per disk (4 of them) equals 
512GB swap ...

(Yes the people at openSUSE said I was being stupid with that much swap)

But declare a 128GB ramdisk, and it'll spill over as required, but 
anything that fits in ram will compile very quick.

And yes, I also used to have my systems configured so they had one 
shared portage area, matching make.conf, and were set up to "use binary 
if it exists, else build one". I had the opposite problem though, my 
nice fast system had a habit of crashing, so I used the old slow one to 
build most things, because it was more reliable. Hey ho.

There's all sorts of tricks, some work for some people, others work for 
others.

Cheers,
Wol