Tom Wijsman posted on Sun, 16 Jun 2013 20:23:24 +0200 as excerpted: > On Sun, 16 Jun 2013 19:21:38 +0200 Pacho Ramos <pa...@gentoo.org> wrote: > >> El dom, 16-06-2013 a las 10:09 -0700, Brian Dolbec escribió: >> [...] >> > Thank you for considering helping. I have stayed away form the >> > intricate details of package management in the past, but I also do >> > not like how long portage is taking now for dep calculations. >> >> And, cannot that efforts be put in enhancing portage instead? > > To make you see the problems and decisions, I'm going to elaborate a > little and would like you to ask yourself some questions. > > Is it possible to reasonable enhance the Portage code to improve dep > calculations in a reasonable amount of time?
TL;DR: SSDs help. =:^) Quite apart from the theory and question of making the existing code faster vs. a new from-scratch implementation, there's the practical question of what options one can actually use to deal with the problem /now/. FWIW, one solution (particularly for folks who don't claim to have reasonable coding skills and thus have limited options in that regard) is to throw hardware at the problem. I recently upgraded my main system to SDD. As it happens, my primary boot didn't speed up much[1], but having both the main system partition (bindirs/libdirs/etc) and the portage tree and overlays on SSD *DRAMATICALLY* improved portage's update-ask-deep-newuse-@world dependency resolution time, both for the cold-tree-cache case, and, surprisingly, even (apparently, I've not timed it but I was sometimes annoyed by the time before especially for hot-cache case, and it hasn't bothered me at all since the upgrade) for the hot-cache case. Between that and the 6-core bulldozer[3] I upgraded to last year, I'm quite happy with portage's current performance, even doing routine rebuilds of the perhaps half of kde I have installed, plus some other packages with @live-rebuild.[2] The SSD doesn't have to be particularly big, either, but fast (if you're running SATA3 to use it) is nice. I figured ~64 gig usage here, tho I wanted some overprovisioning, so thought I'd do 128 gig or so. I ended up with 256 gig, only ~60% partitioned (130-some gig) even with duplicate backup partitions for everything. System, tree, /home, etc, on SSD, but still doing spinning rust for my media partitions and third-copy (second backup) partitions, on demonstrated reliable here reiserfs, while the SSD is all still-development-so-keep-your-backups-updated btrfs. --- [1] I'm running ntp and the initial ntp-client connection and time sync takes ~12 seconds a lot of the time, just over the initial 10 seconds down, 50 to go, trigger on openrc's 1-minute timeout. [2] 131 packages in @live-rebuild, with kde-live-branch, currently 4.10.49.9999, being low 120-some, plus choice bits of of X/mesa/drivers and a few other packages including openrc, btrfs-progs and pan. The @live-rebuild typically takes ~20 minutes with ccache, a good portion of which is kdelibs, so the whole update including the sync and change/git- logs check for interesting stuff, @world update, @live-rebuild, etc- update and revdep-rebuild/depclean, runs ~1 hour, often less, sometimes more if there's a new mozilla-overlay firefox build or something in addition to the kde-libs long-build update. [3] Also relevant, 16 gigs RAM, PORTAGETMPDIR on tmpfs. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
