Re: [gentoo-dev] A few modest suggestions regarding tree size

[Ned Ludd]

On Thu, 2004-10-14 at 12:24, Luke-Jr wrote:
> On Wednesday 13 October 2004 7:31 am, Robin H. Johnson wrote:
> > portage loop file is usually on disk, when a sync is needed:
> > 1. umount loop file
> > 2. copy loop file to /dev/shm or other fast place
> > 3. mount loop file again (from new location)
> > 4. run updates to loop filesystem ('cvs up; emerge metadata' or 'emerge
> > sync') 5. umount loop file, copy back to disk
> > 6. mount loop file again
>
> Since (from what I've heard) Portage's speed issues are mostly I/O, why not
> keep the mounted copy on a tmpfs and simply make an on-disk backup after
> syncing (and copy it back on rebooting)?
>
> On Thursday 14 October 2004 2:07 pm, Ned Ludd wrote:
> > New loopback size is 11M after reading this thread and dumping ChangeLog
> > & metadata.xml files which does seem like a perfectly feasible thing for
> > us to do. Removing leading/trailing whitespace and erroneous newlines
> > yielded no noticeable gains.
>
> 11 MB of RAM may or may not seem reasonable to users depending on how often
> they do things with Portage.

indeed not all users are willing to leave something in resident memory
for extended periods of time. However ebuild/emerge could be extended to
mounting a portage tree vs bailing when one does not exist.

I'm simply providing info more for statistical reasons stating what can
be done possibly for those working in constrained or unique
environments.
On that note I did some more experimenting here and got the tree down to
around 2.7M just enough for an emerge system for my ARCH/KEYWORDS. I
still have a little bit of bloat leftover which is are packages that are
not a direct part of my depgraph or unneeded stuff from the PN/files/

-- 
Ned Ludd <solar@g.o>
Gentoo (hardened,security,infrastructure,embedded,toolchain) Developer