Frank Peters wrote:
On Tue, 19 May 2009 15:18:13 +0200
Branko Badrljica <bran...@avtomatika.com> wrote:
I have /var/tmp on ext4 with delayed allocation on ext4 and 8GB RAM.
For me tmpfs wasn't worth the hassle, so i dropped it. I couldn't tell
the difference.
In all this discussion about tmpfs, there has been no mention of the
gcc "-pipe" option, which instructs the compiler to use RAM instead
creating temporary files. Since gcc is the workhorse of the emerge
process, it would seem that the "-pipe" option should accomplish
results close to that observed with tmpfs.
Well, not even close, unfortunately. -pipe just passes the assembly
source to the assembler by pipe, nothing else. That's like just 5% of
the total I/O involved. The 95% of the rest (reading the source from
disk, writing object code, executables, installing it in a faked root
environment) is not covered by -pipe. And don't forget the minimized
disk fragmentation too since all happens in RAM before merging for real.
