On 2025-07-24, Javier Martinez wrote: > El 24/7/25 a las 16:43, Rahul Sandhu escribió: >> Hi Dale, >> >>> That's the biggest reason I have portage's work directory on tmpfs. If >>> I start having to do it on a disk because of a lack of memory, I'll do >>> it on spinning rust to save my m.2 stick. >> >> This really isn't all that true these days, please take a look at the >> Gentoo wiki article for Portage TMPDIR on tmpfs, which states[1]: >> >>> Users are strongly cautioned against buying additional RAM to use as tmpfs. >> >> [1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Portage_TMPDIR_on_tmpfs >> >> Regards, >> Rahul >> > Its not question of thuth if not opinions instead, and neither to buy > more RAM modules but to take a computer with enough RAM from the > beginning (I will try the next one having 64 GB). > > I don't have swap on disk. And got a system with 32 gb of RAM. I > dedicate 16 of them to /var/tmp/portage. My PC could die and the > harddisk still alive to be used in another system (such as rockpi4c+) > > If you don't use RAM as tmpfs maybe your harddisk will live 5 years, > if it's almost full don't so many years according of the TBW of each > hardisk.
I think hard drives tend to usually last way longer than that, including those used on Gentoo systems and which house /var/tmp/portage. > So, is not buy more RAM, is question to get from the beginning enough > RAM to be able to protect your SSD disk. You can also put your > distfiles dir in tmpfs use --jobs 1 and got it to remove it after > emerging. > > Less writtings more lifespan and gentoo does so many writes when > emerging. Maybe a separate on-disk filesystem with very lazy writeback is a more appropriate solution for this? -- Nuno Silva
