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yanchenko
Asked: 2009-06-30 18:07:42 +0800 CST

Minimizing emerge impact on a low-mem/high load system?

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Any best practices on minimizing system performance impact during emerging?

gentoo

5 Answers

  1. you can set the variable PORTAGE_NICENESS in the file /etc/make.conf. it sums up a nice value to the emerge process, so that it has less priority on the system. for example:

    PORTAGE_NICENESS=10

    the above line, in /etc/make.conf, will make portage increment 10 to the default nice value for that process (this will not set the nice value to 10, it will increment that value).

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  2. Best Answer

    You could always use a different system to do the hard work using distcc: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/distcc.xml

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  3. Apart from setting PORTAGE_NICENESS Use ionice to reduce impact on hard disk and reduce impact on user.

    For example, for installing evolution I would do:

    ionice -c3 emerge -av evolution
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  4. Try cpulimit. It limits cpu usage per process. So, you can tell emerge to use only 10% of your cpu resources.

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  5. @Mark's answer of using distcc sound sgood. Creating binary packages on another system and installing them on the high-load system might be an alternative approach to that one.

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