Proposal, create snapshots of portage as squashfs iso, to be used in place of /usr/portage directory.<br>prior art: see #1<br><br>Already working here: one central server which keep the portage full tree and that after a sync create &quot;portage.sqsh&quot; a squashfs 4.0 iso.<br>
<br>Advantages  are mainly:<br>- cleaner root directory (ext4: du -sh /usr/portage ~= 600M | find /g/portage | wc -l ~= 130000)<br>- faster `emerge --sync`  with fast connections<br>- faster `emerge -uDpvN world`<br>- less cpu/disk load on the server (if not serving from memory)<br>
<br>Disadvantages<br>- need to mount portage, or to use autofs<br>- need kernel &gt;= 2.6.30<br>- bigger rsync transfer size (?= 2x) #2<br>- bigger initial transfer size, lzma snapshot currently weight 30.8M, portage.sqsh 45M<br>
<br>How it&#39;s done here:<br>Currently on the dispatcher the following run after every emerge --sync:<br><br>mksquashfs /usr/portage /srv/portage.sqsh \<br>           -noappend -no-exports -no-recovery -force-uid 250 -force-gid 250<br>
<br>The clients run from cron the following:<br>umount /g/portage 2&gt;/dev/null \ <br>; cp /srv/server/portage.sqsh /var/tmp/portage.sqsh \<br>&amp;&amp; mount /usr/portage<br><br>/etc/fstab:<br>/srv/server/portage.sqsh  /usr/portage  squashfs  loop,ro,noauto 1 1<br>
<br>some real data:<br><br>stats for a portage sync, one day<br><br>Number of files: 136429<br>Number of files transferred: 326<br>Total file size: 180345216 bytes<br>Total transferred file size: 1976658 bytes<br>Literal data: 1976658 bytes<br>
Matched data: 0 bytes<br>File list size: 3377038<br>File list generation time: 0.001 seconds<br>File list transfer time: 0.000 seconds<br>Total bytes sent: 47533<br>Total bytes received: 4120255<br><br>sent 47533 bytes  received 4120255 bytes  124411.58 bytes/sec<br>
total size is 180345216  speedup is 43.27<br><br>stats for a portage.sqsh sync, one day<br><br>Number of files: 1<br>Number of files transferred: 1<br>Total file size: 46985216 bytes<br>Total transferred file size: 46985216 bytes<br>
Literal data: 8430976 bytes<br>Matched data: 38554240 bytes<br>File list size: 27<br>File list generation time: 0.001 seconds<br>File list transfer time: 0.000 seconds<br>Total bytes sent: 48096<br>Total bytes received: 8454837<br>
<br>sent 48096 bytes  received 8454837 bytes  5668622.00 bytes/sec<br>total size is 46985216  speedup is 5.53<br><br><br><br>#1 <a href="http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-2218914.html">http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-2218914.html</a><br>
   <a href="http://www.mail-archive.com/gentoo-dev@g.o/msg05240.html">http://www.mail-archive.com/gentoo-dev@g.o/msg05240.html</a><br><br>#2 May be mitigated by mksquashfs &#39;--sort&#39; option, to be tested<br>

<br>- francesco (vivo)<br>