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Date:      Fri, 20 Jan 2006 11:49:29 -0500
From:      Gary Thorpe <gthorpe@myrealbox.com>
To:        Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org>
Cc:        Wesley Shields <wxs@csh.rit.edu>, Ashok Shrestha <ashok.shrestha@gmail.com>, Brandon Flowers <flowersster@gmail.com>, Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, Dag-Erling Sm?rgrav <des@des.no>
Subject:   Re: speed up port compiling using RAM (tmpfs) ???
Message-ID:  <43D11499.8040808@myrealbox.com>
In-Reply-To: <20060119230604.GA98670@xor.obsecurity.org>
References:  <79e2026f0601142345x1a9269bdl3153d1bb110be08d@mail.gmail.com> <86ek34d35f.fsf@xps.des.no> <17359.49899.183831.844670@bhuda.mired.org> <86k6cww445.fsf@xps.des.no> <20060119175224.GA71633@csh.rit.edu> <79e2026f0601191215p117d78ebjbee2c4b710075154@mail.gmail.com> <43D0139A.1040601@myrealbox.com> <20060119230604.GA98670@xor.obsecurity.org>

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Kris Kennaway wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 05:32:58PM -0500, Gary Thorpe wrote:
> 
>>Ashok Shrestha wrote:
>>
>>>I mounted part of RAM as such:
>>>
>>>mdmfs -s 500m md /mnt
>>>
>>>Then put WRKDIRPREFIX=/path/to/md in /etc/make.conf.
>>>
>>>It substantially reduces compile time by about 5-10 times.
>>>
>>>
>>>Thanx to all ur replies.
>>>
>>>-Ashok Shrestha
>>
>>An alternative is to try using the "-pipe" flag with GCC: this 
>>eliminates the need to use some temporary files by using a unix pipe for 
>>IPC. Setting another flag "-j 2" will allow 2 jobs to be done at the 
>>same time and should eliminate (by hiding) the I/O delays (this slows 
>>down the CPU slightly because of more task switches, but even with one 
>>job there are still lots of generated tasks).
> 
> 
> -j is not safe to use with port builds since many ported software
> contain race conditions in the build.
> 
> Kris

This effectively means that you cannot take advantage of SMP to compile 
FreeBSD's ports collection. That sounds like a big 
limitation...especially for people trying to speed up bulk builds.

Is "-pipe" still a good idea? It should provide a significant 
performance boost, if the process is spending a lot of time doing disk 
I/O, without using up a lot of memory.



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