Gentoo Compiling glibc for 6 Hours?!

So my 192Meg RAM Linode on Host6 took six hours to compile glibc

while doing basically nothing else.

Since this is my first experience with Linux, Gento and compiling GNU

software (but not compiling in general), does this mean:

1. Linodes are disk bound, as I've heard.

2. Compiling is a disk-intensive activity.

3. Host6 was pretty busy Wednesday.

4. Gentoo is not the best choice for a Linode.

5. 192Megs RAM is too little for compiling.

6. I should stop updating my software so frequently.

7. Something's wrong somewhere.

8. All of the above.

I missed saving an SSH session observing the later stages but

I can say that my load average was above 2, top reported most

kernel processes in SW state, and I still had 3-13 Megs free RAM,

per top and free.

The build finished fine. I know I've built this more than once since

getting my Linode and I know it never took this long.

I'd appreciate any and all comments. I'm here to learn.

Thanks,

Wes

5 Replies

@alphonso:

So my 192Meg RAM Linode on Host6 took six hours to compile glibc

while doing basically nothing else.

Since this is my first experience with Linux, Gento and compiling GNU

software (but not compiling in general), does this mean:

1. Linodes are disk bound, as I've heard.

2. Compiling is a disk-intensive activity.

3. Host6 was pretty busy Wednesday.

4. Gentoo is not the best choice for a Linode.

5. 192Megs RAM is too little for compiling.

6. I should stop updating my software so frequently.

7. Something's wrong somewhere.

8. All of the above.

I missed saving an SSH session observing the later stages but

I can say that my load average was above 2, top reported most

kernel processes in SW state, and I still had 3-13 Megs free RAM,

per top and free.

The build finished fine. I know I've built this more than once since

getting my Linode and I know it never took this long.

I'd appreciate any and all comments. I'm here to learn.

Thanks,

Wes

oh. so yer the one futzing up host6! (joking)… six hours isn't unexpected. glibc is a large beast.

-e

> efudd wrote:

oh. so yer the one futzing up host6! (joking)… six hours isn't unexpected. glibc is a large beast.

Am NOT! :)

Thanks for the comment – I don't have any baseline for this stuff

since I've got no desktop box experience to compare it with. Anyway,

I rebooted to the latest kernel and the occasional compile seems

snappier now.

Host6 is showing signs of use though, like pauses in SSH sessions

and sluggishness parsing man pages, but I ain't doing it.

Except for my once-a-week-or-so compile of Gentoo stuff, it's at load 0.

Apache's using something like 7-thousandths of the CPU!

@alphonso:

> efudd wrote:

oh. so yer the one futzing up host6! (joking)… six hours isn't unexpected. glibc is a large beast.

Am NOT! :)

Thanks for the comment – I don't have any baseline for this stuff

since I've got no desktop box experience to compare it with. Anyway,

I rebooted to the latest kernel and the occasional compile seems

snappier now.

Host6 is showing signs of use though, like pauses in SSH sessions

and sluggishness parsing man pages, but I ain't doing it.

Except for my once-a-week-or-so compile of Gentoo stuff, it's at load 0.

Apache's using something like 7-thousandths of the CPU!

lol…. host6 is basically ok for me except for one known issue to-be-resolved-on-the-next-host6-reboot relating to networking. Everything else seems decently snappy for a smallish system. I can't complain too much.

My personal machines are, at minimum, 2.8Ghz processors tho… so I don't expect a lot of overall performance from the UML.

-e

Some of us have low expectations, period – I'm posting this from an iMac with a whizzy 400MHz PPC (not mine : ) ).

I can get a cup of coffee before some menus drop…

I've got no real complaints about my Linode. I think about it very fondly and probably would have given it a cute hostname if I didn't think it'd haunt me someday in tough-guy sysadmin circles.

Imagine Chris reading the request to reverse-DNS my host to "fluffball".

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