Re: [gentoo-amd64] Weird and unpredictable problem: emerge grinds system to a halt

[Petter Haggholm]

Daniel Iliev wrote:
> Petter Haggholm wrote:
>
>> The subject is fairly descriptive. Often -- but not always -- an
>> emerge will render my system unusable. At a PORTAGE_NICENESS of 3, and
>> fairly standard MAKEOPTS of "-j2" (on a single-core system), I'm ...
>> well, rather surprised, confused, and very frustrated. I also can't be
>> very specific, because I have no real idea of what's causing this, and
>> the symptoms are very general: The system becomes unresponsive, the
>> mouse will move but with enough of a lag that physically moving it may
>> not cause a cursor movement for the next 30 seconds or so, clicking a
>> taskbar window may not have an effect at all; sometimes I can't even
>> ssh into the system from my other computer (to kill the emerge)
>> because it's slow enough that the ssh daemon times out my login
>> attempt. This never used to happen, I'm not aware of using any weird
>> settings, I recently rebuilt my entire system with conservative CFLAGS
>> (-march=athlon64 -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer), and I have an x86
>> (pentium-m) system with very, very similar settings that exhibits no
>> such problems.
>>
>> Any hints, thoughts, or suggestions would be very much welcomed.
>> System info follows.
>>
>>
> 1) Does the system go out from this state after some time or you have to
> cold reset it?
> 2) What happens if you put PORTAGE_NICENESS=19, MAKEOPTS of "-j2 -l1" ?
> l5 (small "L", not the number "one"), means "loadavg=<1" If loadavg goes
> up to 1 make waits this level to drop before continuing its job
> 3) Is DMA enabled for your HDD(s)? (hdparm -d1 /dev/xxx)?
> 4) Have you done any overclocking?

1) It does eventually, but it can take a long time. If I have work to 
do, I generally can't afford to outwait it. If I run an overnight build, 
the system will be fine in the morning, but some apps will typically 
have died (killed by GNOME for not responding? I don't know; usually 
Thunderbird will die, and sometimes Firefox as well -- thank heavens for 
Tab Mix Plus and session crash recovery.
2) I did not know of make's -l option, but -l1 seems like a very 
reasonable setting -- I will try that when I don't need to be working 
(hopefully later tonight) and see what it does for me. Thanks!
3) Yep, both hard drives have DMA enabled.
4) Not an overclocker; I value stability much higher than performance.

Without having tried it yet -- I need to finish some work first -- I'm 
curious about the MAKEOPTS thing, especially -j?. The other reply (so 
far) in this thread suggests -j1 and asserts that "[-j2] has no sense 
anyway, if you have no multicore or don't use distcc...". This is in 
contrast to all the recommended settings I have seen so far -- standard 
procedure seems to be -j$(no. cores+1), I presume so that one make 
process can do some CPU work while the other is I/O bound? I suppose one 
could keep the system more responsive at the cost of longer compiles by 
running only one make process, but I have never heard of anyone else 
having problems with -j2 on a single-core system ...

(In the hope that you're reading this, too, Pawel -- I don't think I 
need to spam the list with an extra reply to so short an email -- I 
don't use KDE at all, so the kdeenablefinal flag doesn't really matter 
anymore; it's a leftover from a time long gone when I used some packages 
that pulled in KDE dependencies. I do use gcc 4[.1.1[-r1]], of course, 
but it's working fine with -j2 on my [x86] server and [x86] laptop.)

-- 
Petter Häggholm
-- 
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