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sm-discuss - [SM-Discuss] tmpfs (was : "License Choices" for some reason)

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  • From: "Chris Brien" <christopher_brien AT hotmail.com>
  • To: julian AT openit.de, jon-sven AT frisurf.no
  • Cc: warl0k AT lvcm.com, cerise AT littlegreenmen.armory.com, sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [SM-Discuss] tmpfs (was : "License Choices" for some reason)
  • Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2002 14:12:41 +0100

From: julian AT openit.de (Julian v. Bock)
Hi

>>>>> "JS" == Jon Svendsen <jon-sven AT frisurf.no> writes:

JS> On Mon, 2002-07-22 at 00:40, Glenn Shannon wrote:
>> For the 4 or 5 people in the world who are on the right machines
>> for tmpfs compiling (medium range machines with 768+M of RAM) tmpfs
>> gives them a .05% increase in speed in return for its hefty
>> requirement.

JS> I'll do this one more time ;)

[...]

I agree.

Furthermore, if you don't have X or other expensive services running,
128mb are enough to compile most spells completely in ram. 256mb is
enough for everything but the really big ones.

Julian

My box has 416MB, which isn't too uncommon now, and I've just finished building xfree86 while running X, Gnome2, Mozilla, KDE and OpenOffice at the same time. Total amount of swap used: ~500kB; this number didn't change during the compilation. Result: xfree86 built entirely in RAM.

It is true that if you don't have enough physical RAM, tmpfs will use swap. But remember that when compiling, there is a tendency to reread the same same files repeatedely (intermediate files, headers, multiply-included sources etc). When using tmpfs, only the least used files are actually written to swap. Even other processes such as X can be swapped out to make room for tmpfs files.

Overall, even when heavily using swap, tmpfs will make less disk-accesses, which will speed up compile time. And the swapspace requirement is not actually any different to what would be needed compiling on physical disk anyway.

This is the last I'm going to say on the subject.

Chris
aka zero_the_hero

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