>> 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 doubt swap has anything at all to do with this problem myself, but > it will be interesting to hear from others. > > 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. > If this is a single processor machine and you're in the middle of a > big emerge then likely you're just going to lose interactivity. It's > the nature of the beast. You could try > > PORTAGE_NICE= > > in make.conf and possibly get some relief. > > Cheers, > Mark 'onice -c 3 emerge -DuN world' ended up working great. - Grant
