Re: [gentoo-user] Near freezes during large emerges

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 5:13 PM, William Kenworthy <billk@×××××××××.au> wrote:
> On Sun, 2011-01-16 at 14:41 -0800, Grant wrote:
>> >> I've been running without swap for quite a while, but my system goes
>> >> into a near freeze whenever I undertake a large emerge such as
>> >> chromium or openoffice.  Is there anything I can do to prevent this
>> >> besides turning swap back on?  I have 3GB RAM and MAKEOPTS="-j1".
>> >>
>> >> - Grant
>> >>
>> >>
>> >
>> > As Volker says, don't turn swap off. Make it small if you must, but
>> > keep some around. It's just disk space.
>>
>> I thought swap was no longer necessary on a machine with sufficient
>> memory.  I guess I took I some bad advice a while back.
>
> The answer is that you have insufficient memory when emerging - hence
> swap is necessary - turn it on!  ionice will help, but it is alleviating
> symptoms of lack of swap, not curing it.  Downside in this case is
> slower emerges and some will still be flaky.
>

I think that's well worded. He has insufficient memory when emerging.

If he's really running short of DRAM Then he might also do well to
boot to a console and do his emerges there. No memory given over to
other things like KDE or browsers, etc.

I am a bit surprised though that a -j1 type emerge would be running
out of memory on a 3GB machine. I just finished emerge updates on a
desktop with 4GB and only used 2.5GB which includes KDE, FIrefox and a
number of other things:

mark@firefly ~ $ top
top - 17:24:12 up  1:58,  3 users,  load average: 1.01, 1.03, 0.91
Tasks: 121 total,   1 running, 120 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  1.0%us,  0.6%sy,  0.0%ni, 98.4%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   3851008k total,  2466316k used,  1384692k free,   351200k buffers
Swap:  8393924k total,        0k used,  8393924k free,  1316212k cached


- Mark