On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 3:18 PM, Richard Freeman <ri...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > I'll just echo what Duncan said about nice / ionice. However, you might > find the impact of ionice -c 3 on compilation is reduced if you use a tmpfs > for /var/tmp/portage. Note that depending on what you're building you might > need a fairly large tmpfs, and it could trigger swapping.
I agree, I use /dev/shm (4gigs) for my portage tmpdir and it has had a bigger noticeable speed impact than ccache or niceness, and the silence of zero disk activity (other than reading the distfiles in the unpack stage and installing the compiled files) is nice, too.
