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

[Lord Sauron]

On 5/25/06, Daniel da Veiga <danieldaveiga@×××××.com> wrote:
> On 5/25/06, Lord Sauron <lordsauronthegreat@×××××.com> wrote:
> > 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.

Okay, the date is when I installed Gentoo.  You're right.

> > 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.

Forgive my ignorance, but what is 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.

Yeah, well this new Gentoo user wouldn't have gotten past partitioning
my hard drive without the installer.  I know it does let less
experience people - like myself - into the community of vastly more
experienced Gentoo users, however, I also think it's been a great tool
for learning more about Linux.

> > 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.

So any portage slowness now is just because...  yeah, I really should
look into this, because I see no reason why portage should be running
as slow as it is.

> > 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.

It booted, so I'm perfectly happy.  It's spitting out coldplug errors
right now, so I'm going to be hammering out some more settings, but it
still boots and runs just fine, so I can't complain.

> 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.

I ran make && make install.  I'm absolutely positive I'm running the
new kernel because I've looked in /boot and it's there, and I've
looked to check which kernel is actually running and it's the new one.
 The symlink in /usr/src is still pointing to the old kernel because I
haven't bothered to change that yet, but I'll do it very soon.
Especially since I gave in and unmasked YaKuake.  I love Yakuake!

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

I think I got it right the first time, which is ample reason for
celebration as far as I'm concerned.

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