Re: [gentoo-user] Re: May be OT: recommended niceness settings for Portage while using Gnome?

["Arttu V." <arttuv69@gmail.com>]

On 8/21/09, Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@arcor.de> wrote:
> However, also very important is "I/O nice".  Setting an ionice
> value of "idle" will result in portage not blocking your other
> applications whey they need to do disk I/O:
>
>    PORTAGE_IONICE_COMMAND="ionice -c 3 -p \${PID}"

Yes, as it is a laptop, it's likely to have a slow 5400 RPM disk. I
have a nearly same-spec old laptop (~5.5 yo, P4m 2.2GHz, 256+256MB
RAM), but I haven't had much trouble with portage emerges on it. Only
when something big is due to in the I/O (lots of swapping due to the
small RAM, kernel sources being unpacked, 100+ MB file transfer over
from LAN etc) has there been slowness which has been annoying.

Given the open nature of OP's question I'm also offering
MAKEOPTS="-j1". It's not really that much a "speed optimization" (on
the contrary?), but another way to try to keep the disk I/O and CPU to
yourself -- even if the compiles will take a bit longer on the
background. (And this ionice thing I got to try as well on that old
clunker, thanks for the tip!)

-- 
Arttu V.