On Fri, May 12, 2023 at 6:46 AM Peter Humphrey <pe...@prh.myzen.co.uk> wrote: > > On Friday, 12 May 2023 00:08:03 BST Mark Knecht wrote: > > On Thu, May 11, 2023 at 3:07 PM Peter Humphrey <pe...@prh.myzen.co.uk> > > > > wrote: > > > On Thursday, 11 May 2023 17:18:17 BST Mark Knecht wrote: > > <SNIP> > > > > > > The ''problem' is this can easily hit 100% of the cores you have in the > > > > machine if not sensibly set. (You choose what's 'sensible') > > > > > > Once again, --load-average is being ignored. Why is it there? Surely, it > > > must be to mitigate the worst effects of that N*K, but it isn't doing so. > > > > From your description, yeah, it's weird, but possibly it's managing it over > > (for instance) over much longer time frames or something like that. > > > > Or possibly it just doesn't work. > > That's it, I'm sure. > > > Or possibly whoever wrote the man page misunderstood. > > Load-average has been around for a long time. > > > Poking around a bit this morning I took the path at the bottom of the > > link I gave you to the Portage niceness page. It says scheduling policy > > control started with portage-3.0.35 which on paper sounds sort of recent. > > Possibly a bug crept in, but I was curious as to what you have for > > PORTAGE_SCHEDULING_POLICY, if any, and whether you need to enable some > > sort of scheduling to get this under control? > > > > https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Portage_niceness > > I have no PORTAGE_SCHEDULING_POLICY, or not that I can find. It seems to me > that such a policy is to do with the running of portage in the OS, rather than > how it launches its own emerge jobs. Is that right? > > > Anyway, I feel for ya.
Peter, My point about PORTAGE_SCHEDULING_POLICY is that it *might* have an effect on what you're seeing, not that it *would* have an effect. If there's one thing I most distrust about the Open Source world, it's documentation... WRT the floating point issue, the Gentoo Catalyst page https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Catalyst in the "Jobs and load average" section states: <QUOTE> FILE /etc/catalyst/catalyst.confcatalyst.conf # Integral value passed to emerge as the parameter to --jobs and is used to # define MAKEOPTS during the target build. jobs = 4 # Floating-point value passed to emerge as the parameter to --load-average and # is used to define MAKEOPTS during the target build. # load-average = 4.0 </QUOTE> so once again, the use of floating point is documented as (you choose) either important or required. My opinion: load-average probably works, but we are misunderstanding the documentation. Note that the example using 4.0 is a pretty load number. Good luck, Mark
