On Wed, 16 Dec 2015 18:58:48 +0000 Tati Chevron <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 01:01:51PM -0500, Christopher Sean Hilton wrote: > >I'm trying to dpb to maintain a small set of packages for a handfull > >of OpenBSD boxes that I run. These boxes will all be single purpose > >servers of some type or another. Many of them will run with limited > >disk space and memory on Soekris hardware. What resources do I want on > >my dpb/build box to make it fast? > > What do you mean by, 'fast'? The dictionary antonym of slow. What do you mean by mean? > Our couple of build machines are both fairly standard core i5 boxes with > 16 gb of RAM, and Corsair SSDs. This season the sweet spot goes towards i7 4770 / 4790 with 32 GB RAM. The logic behind this is the fastest desktop CPU for around $300-$350 price point with as much RAM as it can hold. DDR4 is not mainstream, yet, and this goes for some time. As for storage, the lowest size of Intel 3500 / 3510 SSDs and the 2-3 GB HGST HDDs, both 1x per system. No RAID, or just pass-through. You can spare the SSD cost, but don't use silly gamer/enthusiast desktop class jagged metal style covered parts that hide a flaky controller board (go for the Data Centre optimised versions from Intel, really discard advice from gamers). Don't forget 12 cm fans and a reliable 350-400 W PSU (cheap and almost OK goes for Seasonic), and have a cold standby PSU unit just in case. Oh yes, pick a Supermicro motherboard with a dedicated IPMI LAN port, you'll find use for it. > The RAM seems to make more difference than anything else, because you > can set the work directory to a ramdisk, and do the entire build > without touching the disk. Nice point. > I wrote a short paper on tweaking the ports build system here: > > http://www.gotati.com/papers/customising_openbsd_ports.html > > >My dpb/build box is a VMWare virtual machine on a host with SSD > >storage. Tweaking the number of available CPU's, the memory, or the > >type of storage is relatively simple > > It's probably best to experiment and see what works best for your workload. > Much depends on the specific ports you are building, whether they will > benefit most from RAM or CPU, for example. Or both. Drop VMWare on the floor NOW, if you need virtualisation use generic QEMU/KVM in any recent Linux distribution of your choice and plan to wipe it clean after you're done fiddling with it. Yes, really seriously remove the virtualisation for a build machine, go bare metal. Try without hyperthreading for a comparison. Before you notice and get to complain you need VM for something just use the native OpenBSD hypervisor. > Also, be aware that some ports have a mass of unnecessary dependencies, > and that tweaking this can reduce the build time substantially, especially > if you are building the same packages repeatedly for some reason. Use a "virtual" axe ;-) virtually "axing" around.
