Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Re: vm still grinding away at compiling webkitgtk-2.14.2
Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2016 14:06:34
Message-Id: CAGfcS_nA_WHVqcmnnP=UobYX94OFs54hyDftOdT-VsyBcW3NJg@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: [gentoo-user] Re: vm still grinding away at compiling webkitgtk-2.14.2 by Harry Putnam
1 On Sun, Nov 20, 2016 at 8:45 AM, Harry Putnam <reader@×××××××.com> wrote:
2 > "J. Roeleveld" <joost@××××××××.org> writes:
3 >
4 >> Also, overcommitting CPUs has a bad influence on performance,
5 >> especially if the host wants to use all cores as well.
6 >
7 > That is what I asked advice about. What do you call
8 > `overcommitting'. For example with only 1 Vbox vm started and no
9 > serious work being done by the windwos-10 os. On an HP xw8600 with
10 > older 2x Xeon 5.60 3.00Ghz with 32 GB ram
11 >
12
13 IMO over-committing CPU isn't actually THAT bad. The CPU obviously
14 gets divided n ways, but that's as far as it goes. There isn't that
15 much overhead switching between VMs (though there certainly is some).
16
17 Over-committing RAM on the other hand can definitely cause more
18 serious issues, because then you're dealing with swap. Dividing 1 CPU
19 3 ways gives you 1/3rd of a CPU (but collectively the 3 VMs are
20 putting out close to a full CPU's worth of work). If you're
21 over-committing RAM and you go into swap, then the performance of all
22 your hosts might drop considerably, adding up to WAY less than the
23 total your box is capable of.
24
25 If your host is windows then this isn't an option for you (seriously,
26 you should re-consider that), but if you could use a linux host
27 another solution is containers. In general they are FAR more flexible
28 around RAM use and of course RAM tends to be the most precious
29 commodity when you're running guests of any kind. With a container
30 you don't have to pre-allocate the RAM, so if Gentoo needs 8GB of RAM
31 right now it isn't as big a deal because in 15min when you're done
32 building it will go back down to 100MB or whatever it actually needs
33 to run.
34
35 In general Gentoo doesn't need a lot of RAM to operate, it is a fairly
36 minimal distro in general. Now, obviously if you're running webkit
37 then you're running it as more of a desktop and that is going to
38 consume a lot more RAM than a console-based system, on any distro. If
39 anything you could still tweak USE flags and CFLAGS to reduce your RAM
40 footprint compared to most distros (whether this is worthwhile is
41 another matter). However, the one exception to this is when you're
42 building things. Ideally when you're building you want to use lots of
43 cores, which means more gcc instances using more RAM each, and you
44 want to be doing all of this on a tmpfs that uses even more RAM.
45
46 Back when I was running Gentoo VMs I would typically set the RAM use
47 to something fairly minimal (think ~1GB or less). Then when I was
48 doing updates I'd up the setting to basically all the free RAM on my
49 host and allocate multiple CPU cores to it, then mount a tmpfs on
50 /var/tmp. When I was done building I'd shrink it back down to a
51 normal config. And I wouldn't be doing builds on multiple hosts at
52 once.
53
54 These days with containers I just run emerge on a few at a time and I
55 don't worry about it (still with /var/tmp on a tmpfs in each). Now, I
56 wouldn't go building chromium and libreoffice in multiple containers
57 at once that way, but for typical server-like guests very few packages
58 use THAT much RAM.
59
60
61 --
62 Rich

Replies

Subject Author
[gentoo-user] Re: vm still grinding away at compiling webkitgtk-2.14.2 Harry Putnam <reader@×××××××.com>
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: vm still grinding away at compiling webkitgtk-2.14.2 "J. Roeleveld" <joost@××××××××.org>