Recommended Preformance Suggestions...(SOLVED)

southpaw · Last edited by southpaw on Sat Oct 22, 2005 3:20 am; edited 1 time in total

Hello Fellow Gentooer's,
I'm calling you out for a little help for myself and possibly anyone else who maybe considering doing the same thing. Basically, I've been using this Dell Inspiron 600M Laptop for about a year now, I started getting involved with using Linux as a secondary experimental OS in a dual boot setup with non other than WinXP. Gentoo was my first distro of choice right around this time last year, and although I have tried other distros(Debian,Mandrake, and Slackware), even though I would always read that distros such as Debian, Gentoo, and Slackware, were not considered to be nOOb friendly, I always felt the opposite. Now although some folks may not have enough time on their hands to learn how to navigate and control a new OS and would prefer a turnkey system so that they could point and click to their hearts content, I felt that the best way to learn what type of system would best suit my needs was to learn it from the inside out, this of course is why I always kept coming back to Gentoo.

Now without babbling too much I'll get to my point :wink:

. Now, one year wiser in the world of Gentoo GNU/Linux, and the tweaker in me is starting to tap me on the shoulder again. I have pretty much topped out on my internal hardware:

Now that being pretty much stock, I've since swapped the Hard Drive for an 80Gb @5400rpm and 1024Mhz(1Gb) of PC2100 DDR RAM, which has given her quite a performance boost.
However, I was wondering what other suggestions might someone offer to enhance my systems overall performance. I've read somewhere on the forums that there are ways to set up you partition scheme that help achieve some speed boosts, like:

Putting Portage in its own Partition...
or also putting /home in its own partition

Anyway, if anyone has any other suggestions, ideas, or partition schemes that could be of some use, it would be much appreciated,
THANX

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nlindblad · Guru Joined: 30 Jun 2005 Posts: 476 Location: Lund, Sweden

I suggest you consider replacing your current filesystems with ReiserFS if you're using anything else...

vipernicus · Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2005 1:32 pm Post subject:

First (only if you don't already have gcc-3.4.4 and glibc with nptl):
/etc/portage/package.keywords
~sys-devel/gcc-3.4.4 ~x86
sys-devel/gcc-config ~x86
sys-libs/libstdc++-v3 ~x86
sys-libs/glibc ~x86

/etc/make.conf
USE="nptl nptlonly pic"
FEATURES="ccache"

emerge ccache && emerge -e system

afterwards:

/etc/make.conf
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
#
CFLAGS="-march=pentium-m -mtune=pentium-m -msse -msse2"
CFLAGS="${CFLAGS} -pipe"
CFLAGS="${CFLAGS} -Os"
CFLAGS="${CFLAGS} -fomit-frame-pointer"
#CFLAGS="${CFLAGS} -fstack-protector-all"
CFLAGS="${CFLAGS} -fno-ident"
CFLAGS="${CFLAGS} -fforce-addr"
CFLAGS="${CFLAGS} -ftracer"
CFLAGS="${CFLAGS} -fweb
CFLAGS="${CFLAGS} -falign-functions=4"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS} -fvisibility-inlines-hidden"
#
LDFLAGS="-Wl,-O1 -Wl,--sort-common"
MAKEOPTS="-j2"
USE="nptl nptlonly pic"

Also, use ck-sources, optimize kernel for size and also set function alignments to 4 in kernel as well. Never use -O3, -O2 is alright, but -Os makes programs load faster and use less memory and has better cache optimization. You can remove -fstack-protector-all if you like, glibc and grub may fail with it, but if you care about possible buffer overflows, leave it in. After you have your system where you want it emerge prelink and run: prelink -amvR.

Good luck. If you don't want to switch to reiserfs, just do this for ext3: boot to livecd and, type: tune -O dir_index /dev/hdXX
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southpaw · Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2005 2:29 pm Post subject:

I have a couple of questions for vipernicus, but first I will say that I did use the Jackass! Gentoo installation method, so most of these options are already compiled in by default including using ReiserFS as my file system for my /boot and my / partition, I also have ccache installed and enabled in my /etc/make.conf with ccache size set at "2Gb" , mainly because I have 1Gb of 266Mhz DDR RAM(2x512 stick's) . However, I was always under the impression that -O3, -O2 optimizations made for a faster system, could you explain why you think that ommiting those optimizations could help to improve performance?

Also, I know I probably said this before, but I'm not sure where I read it but, do you think that my system could benefit in a performance boost from splitting up the partitions say, one for /home, one for /portage, etc..etc..?

Oh, and are there any services that I could do without so that my system could boot up faster?

THANX

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vipernicus · Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2005 3:25 pm Post subject:

southpaw · Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2005 6:06 pm Post subject:

Thanx for the detailed reply brudda, also I think it's great that you're writing a cookbook, that's awsome

. I myself have set out to eventually create a handbook along those lines. However, my goal was to develop a Digital Audio Workstation(DAW), a computer based multitrack sequencer with Gentoo as the system OS, as well as a realtime sampler (along the lines of Tascam's Gigastudio) workstation seperate from the DAW, also with Gentoo as the core OS. I chose Gentoo for it's profound configurability, personally I can't think of another distro that is as tweakable. However, those projects are (tons of research, R&D, and many hours) several years up the pike :wink:

.
Back to the now, I have another question for you regarding your first post. I noticed that you mentioned to set the kernels "function alignment to 4", is that a ck-sources specific option because I'm using the usual "gentoo-sources", and I don't recall seeing that option available anywhere while configuring and compiling the kernel originally?

Oh, and while were still on the subject of cooking some what :wink:

. I've got a bunch of USE flags enabled in my /etc/make.conf that I enabled myself before emerging certain packages in my system. This got me thinking ( :lol:

imagine that), is there a better way to enable or disable package specific USE flags that are only necessary for specific packages and serve no real benefit to the system as a whole? For some reason, I get the feeling that when I enable a certain USE flag for a certain package in /etc/make.conf, that maybe there might be a more appropriate place to put the said USE flag, hopefully that wasn't too confusing

...Anyway, let me know, thanx

...
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vipernicus · Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2005 6:23 pm Post subject:

southpaw · Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2005 6:35 pm Post subject:

So that would be the correct place to enable said USE flags as opposed to /etc/make.conf?
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vipernicus · Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2005 6:38 pm Post subject:

southpaw · Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2005 8:51 pm Post subject:

That's what I figured, I just needed someone confirm it. I guess this means that I have to move a lot of package specific USE flags from /etc/make.conf to /etc/portage/package.use :wink:

.
Btw, that peice of information alone is incredibly valuable to me, which is why I love browsing these forums so much, THANX again brudda

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vipernicus · Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2005 9:18 pm Post subject:

What did you settle for on your cflags?
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southpaw · Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2005 11:52 pm Post subject:

Well these are the stock Jackass! Pentium3 Optimizations,

vipernicus · Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2005 12:03 am Post subject:

southpaw · Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2005 1:11 am Post subject:

I heard, or I should say, I've read that setting "LDFLAGS" causes system instability and it isn't worth the risk, what's your take on that?
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southpaw · Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2005 2:58 am Post subject:

Well I used all of your suggestions, the only one had omit was the LDFLAGS line because I kept having errors so I commented them out.
So far I'm at about (12 of 200), will see how far she gets

...
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vipernicus · Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2005 12:39 pm Post subject:

southpaw · Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2005 2:53 pm Post subject:

Good morning,
Actually I don't remember, I usually write down whatever errors I may run into, but I do remember that it was the first package of "emerge -e system" and yeah I know that probably doesn't tell you much. Oh yeah, I just remembered, isn't there a log file that I could check out from yesterday evening that would tell me what it was???

P.S. "emerge -e system" finished this morning at about 7:30AM, so that's 200 packages in about 10 hours. Then it rolled into "emerge -e world", which right now it's at (gasp) 50 of 380

...
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RuiP · l33t Joined: 15 Jan 2005 Posts: 643

the log will be, by default, at /var/log/emerge.log
Weird. I never read it about LDFLAGS compile errors... are you sure is not another thing?

Note that most people do an

southpaw · Posted: Thu Oct 20, 2005 12:07 am Post subject:

Sorry it took me so long to get back, but for some reason my ISP randomly craps out on me every now and again, which of course forced me to go to my campus library to pick my classes for Fall semester, and now I'm back, hewww... Anyway, to answer your question vipernicus, the package that gave me the error was:

RuiP · l33t Joined: 15 Jan 2005 Posts: 643

cvs e17 are many times very slow (or under heavy load), so sometimes emerging e17 could be a pain...

Anyway, e17 requires a correct order of compile packages, something not always preserved by 'world' list. if you compiled once maybe it work ok, but can give you sometimes dependency errors.
and e17 is alpha experimental code. it should not be in your world list.
Maybe you should unemerge all e17 packages, emerge -e world and after finish redo the e17 world *in the correct order* and using the --oneshot option to emerge, to avoid being added that world list.

So patch didnt compiled with LDFLAGS?... weird. you don't remember exactlly the error?
LDFLAGS is the "equivalent" to prelink. it would speedy the start up of huge apps.
Is a pity give up that on the fail of one app. Try to investigate the cause.
If you read around, usually insane cflags cause a lot of errors, but LDFLAGS didn't appear very commonly as a bad boy

Of course you can later prelink... but there are more chances you got problems there...

vipernicus · Posted: Thu Oct 20, 2005 1:43 pm Post subject:

southpaw · Posted: Thu Oct 20, 2005 2:57 pm Post subject:

Good morning again guys,
That looks like an awsome script vipernicus, I'm looking foward to adding it to my arsenal :wink:

. One question though, however, this is in reference to a comment that RuiP made previously. How do you(vipernicus) feel about, what I like to call "System Calibration", by way of :

vipernicus · Posted: Thu Oct 20, 2005 3:35 pm Post subject:

southpaw · Posted: Thu Oct 20, 2005 9:13 pm Post subject:

Hey vipernicus,
I just thought I would let you know that I wiped my drive and reinstalled my system. I know what your probably thinking but I wanted to try a different partition layout, nothing fancy:

RuiP · l33t Joined: 15 Jan 2005 Posts: 643

hi.
So your start from fresh... from jackass i presume, since you are re-compiling everything again.

vipernicus is absolutly right about double emerge -e system.
The problem is, if you had a problematic gcc and/or glibc an emerge -e system with sane cflags will put those ok, but still compiled with the old not so good gcc/glibc. So a second emerge -e system will recompile system (and the compiler) with the new and correct compiler and against correct glibc. "Clear as mud", in the immortal words of BobP :lol:

(Some arguments could be made for -e world... but here you need to be a little too paranoid about incorrect libraries against you compile world apps. For me a single -e world is more then nice. But you can have another opinion... most people seems to do it twice)
In case of the -e system, and since the question is compile the toolchain with a good toolchain i avoid the double emerge by doing: