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Mark Haney wrote: |
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> Paul Hartman wrote: |
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>> I agree, I use /dev/shm (4gigs) for my portage tmpdir and it has had a |
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>> bigger noticeable speed impact than ccache or niceness, and the |
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>> silence of zero disk activity (other than reading the distfiles in the |
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>> unpack stage and installing the compiled files) is nice, too. |
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>> |
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> |
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> I would do this, however, my problem is (or was) RAM. Until yesterday I |
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> had only 1GB RAM in this laptop. Now I have doubled it which is the max |
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> it will support (it's 4 years old). I don't think 2GB is worth trying a |
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> tmpfs for. |
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> |
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|
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I wouldn't let this deter you. I only have 2GB of RAM in my server and |
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it is doing quite a bit (myth, apache, samba, shorewall, postfix, etc). |
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I just have a nice big 8GB swap partition and I never have issues. |
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|
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In the worst case using lots of tmpfs causes swapping which slows down |
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compilation due to IO. In the best case, not using tmpfs causes lots of |
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writing to disk and slowdown due to IO. In my opinion the worst that |
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can happen with tmpfs is that it just goes no faster than what you see |
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now. In certain well-tuned applications there might be benefits to not |
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using swap at all, but if you have a swapfile now the system will use it |
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whether your RAM is full or not, and at least with tmpfs you have the |
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benefit of separating long-term file storage from short-term file |
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storage and allowing the OS to optimize accordingly. |
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