Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@×××××.de>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-user] Re: Best way to improve interactivity with heavy disk activity?
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2010 01:19:56
Message-Id: icuv0a$pvr$1@dough.gmane.org
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Best way to improve interactivity with heavy disk activity? by Peter Humphrey
1 On 11/29/2010 02:59 AM, Peter Humphrey wrote:
2 > On Sunday 28 November 2010 23:57:07 Stroller wrote:
3 >> On 28/11/2010, at 7:18pm, Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
4 >>> Anyway, did the ck kernel help in some way with your problem?
5 >> I will give this my full attention tomorrow, taking time to re-read
6 >> all posts and google. It might be a couple of days before I try CK's
7 >> sources, to be honest. Compilation takes a couple of hours on this
8 >> system, and I just know that I'm going to have to give it a little
9 >> attention.
10 >
11 > After reading this thread I decided to give CK sources a go. Make
12 > oldconfig offered me one option, whose help message made it pretty clear I
13 > should set it. Otherwise the config was the same as I'd been using on
14 > Gentoo sources.
15 >
16 > Compilation took 9 minutes. After rebooting into KDE 4.5.3 I set some
17 > more emerges going: open office, pywebkitgtk, chromium. Switching to
18 > another desktop took 8 seconds to finish painting the screen. Not
19 > propitious.
20 >
21 > Once the other jobs had finished and only open office was compiling,
22 > response was much faster, even when it got to a threaded section and was
23 > using all four cores.
24 >
25 > Looks like a worthwhile experiment to continue.
26
27 Also try to set these in your make.conf:
28
29 PORTAGE_NICENESS=19
30 PORTAGE_IONICE_COMMAND="sh -c \"schedtool -D \${PID}; ionice -c 3 -p
31 \${PID}\""
32
33 This will run all emerges nice 19, "idle" i/o priority and
34 SCHED_IDLEPRIO CPU scheduling. The "ionice" and "schedtool" utilities
35 must be installed of course.
36
37 I think you will love the results ;-) Given enough RAM, emerging
38 packages will have almost no effect on the system's usability. In my
39 case, I can for example watch 1080p HD movies without problems while
40 building OpenOffice.

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Best way to improve interactivity with heavy disk activity? Stroller <stroller@××××××××××××××××××.uk>