Afternoon all, It seems that portage's self-protection from overload is incomplete - or so I've been led to believe by some pretty odd goings-on.
Injudicious fiddling with -j, --jobs and --load-average can easily cause miscompilation of packages without causing an OOM or any other sign of problems. For some time, I had those values set to take advantage of the 24 threads and 64GB of RAM in this machine (not to mention 8 + 50GB swap, little of which appears ever to be used), resulting in the load average rising into three digits at times - over 200, even. But no sign of difficulty was shown and all appeared to have gone to plan. Until I ran the system, when odd errors would show. One example I remember is Firefox having a bizarre colour scheme (the window frame, not the page display) and missing the three upper-right buttons. That wasn't corrected by recompiling Firefox, so I assume the problem was lower down. I think I have some safe values now (time will tell), but it's worrying that compilation errors can go undetected. Of course I don't know where to start looking for the problem; I just hope someone else does. Meanwhile, is it possible to set things up so that, say, qtwebengine is never compiled at the same time as anything else? I don't want to rely on my noticing and intervening, and besides, it isn't always possible just to --exclude it. -- Regards, Peter.
