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

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 2:41 PM, Grant <emailgrant@×××××.com> 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.
>

I think the idea is never use swap if possible, but in a case where
you don't have swap space or run out of swap space I think it's still
possible to lose data. I no longer double memory in swap. In the old
days I did that. On this server I have 24GB or memory. It seems silly
to chew up 50GB of disk space for something that almost never gets
touched. If I see this machine swapping I turn something off, but I'm
the only user and here to watch what it's doing.


<SNIP>
>> You don't say what sort of processor this machine has, nor what sort
>> of hard drives. Even on a very high-end machine I saw the symptoms you
>> report when I tried a 4K sector WD Green drive with the partitions
>> misaligned. Once properly aligned the machine worked as expected.
>
> It's a laptop with a dual-core 2.2ghz CPU.
>

So -j1 is pretty safe. That's what I was wondering...

<SNIP>
>
> 'onice -c 3 emerge -DuN world' ended up working great.
>
> - Grant

Yeah, I saw the response that got you there. Good info and good to
know it works.

Cheers,
Mark