Re: [gentoo-user] Now Know Why Portage Is So Slow

[Daniel da Veiga]

On 5/25/06, Lord Sauron <lordsauronthegreat@×××××.com> wrote:
> I think I may have made a break through here!
>
> I've always noticed that everything portage is very slow.  It's like
> it's having to un-tar and un-bzip everything all the time...  lo and
> behold, it is.

No, it is not.

>
> I've found (after much exploration) that there is a archive:
> /portage-20060123.tar.bz2

Simply a portage snapshot, maybe the one you used to install Gentoo in
the first place? Take a look at the date and tell me I'm wrong.

>
> This has - to the best of my knowledge - all the ebuild headers or
> whatever for everything.  I know I can un-tar this and all, however, I
> want portage to use it in its uncompressed state, just to speed things
> up.  I'm not burning for hard drive space, so a little more speed
> would be great.

Of course, it is a portage snapshot, it has a whole compressed portage
tree, used to install, or update portage when using alternative
methods for those (like me) that lack the capacity to use remote
RSYNC.

>
> However, I have no idea where to start to try and configure portage to
> reflect a change like this.  I've read the man pages for ebuild and
> emerge several times over without finding any hints, so I was thinking
> someone on this list would know.

There's no "change" and there's no such feature. If you take a look at
/usr/portage, you'll notice that is has all "portage related" stuff
there, a snapshot is decompressed there when you install (correct me
if I'm wrong, but you installed using the Gentoo Installer, didn't
you? if you had a complete experience of Gentoo install, you would
know that by now, that's why I strongly advice new users to AVOID THE
INSTALLER). If you sync once in a while, it is updated. Portage is not
kept compressed.

>
> I also think that there's another file, /metadata.tar.bz2, which I
> think is portage-related.  If possible I'd like to uncompress that as
> well.

Oh, this one was a good choice, metadata is used by portage, but if
you take a look at /usr/portage/metadata, it is uncompressed there
too, and that is what portage uses.

>
> I think this is the cause of a slow portage because everything takes a
> long time to start going, then it's just fine.  It takes about as long
> to start going as it does to open the archive
> /portage-20060123.tar.bz2 - conincidence?  I think not!

But it is. That's because of caching, not because it uncompress
everything every time and compress it again later, that would be
stupid (forgive my language).

>
> I also get the bonehead award: there was a new kernel sitting on my
> hard drive and just yesterday I found and installed it.  It was
> remarkably easy to install!  I loaded the configuration file from my
> old kernel and then just make && make install and it worked!  I didn't
> even have to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst!  Dang...  I got done and said
> "that was easy."  I think I'm really getting the hang of all this!

You have run an "emerge -u world" and it got the kernel sources, you
have no special needs and so the default configuration fit your need,
compiling kernels is EASY, making them work, that's a hard one.

You sincerely must be booting from your old kernel and your
/usr/src/linux link must be pointing at your old sources, else you
would have some problems and probably would have to recompile,
reconfigure some stuff, because after make and all, you should copy
the image to /boot and, if necessary, change the grub.conf (menu.lst)
to point at the right file.

See the Kernel upgrade guide at Gentoo.org for more info.

-- 
Daniel da Veiga
Computer Operator - RS - Brazil
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