Gentoo unresponsive when emerging chromium/libreoffice

ryanli · n00b Joined: 20 Oct 2010 Posts: 29

It's an issue that has been troubling me for quite a long time. When I am using my Gentoo box and emerging large applications, incl. chromium and libreoffice, the system will absolutely become unresponsive during that time. Moving the mouse/switching to tty took a hell couple minutes for the computer to respond.

I could wait for this to end, but usually it will take one or two hours, when the emerge process finishes (and probably successfully). After that some my Chromium tabs will display "He's dead, Jim!".

This happens on both of my laptops, each of which is equipped with Intel Core i5 processor, and 4 GiB RAM, with no swap space. I am not sure whether no swap space is the cause, but when I run free when emerging it usually shows that I have more than 1 GiB free memory.

Would be great if there's someone who could help me out there!

Chiitoo · Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2012 4:54 pm Post subject: ><)))°€

Teegrins, ryanli!

I can only say that, what you describe, is exactly how my system would perform when I was low on memory (was down to 2 GiB from 4 due to one stick going bad). The builds would usually fail, too, depending of the size.

So even if you do seem to have enough of it (4 I think should still be adequate, I would guess, even though some packages has become quite ridonkulous), I would suggest trying to add some swap space. I'm pretty sure it can't at least hurt to try!

That's what I'd try.

I guess there could be something specific to how the laptops do things (as in, do they perhaps reserve some memory so that the free you are seeing is not available), that I don't currently know of, and could be tweaked to make a difference without swap... Just guessing here. Might be waaay off. ^^;

Good luck!
_________________
Kindest of regardses.

ryanli · n00b Joined: 20 Oct 2010 Posts: 29

Thanks!

/me swapon /dev/sdb3 # 40 GiB SSD

^marcs · Apprentice Joined: 09 Mar 2005 Posts: 169

It is also a good idea to decrease parallel make jobs for those packages, on my 3GB system at work I'm using -j1 for chromium and it's working OK even when I'm using bunch of other programs at the same time - downside of this solution is that compilation takes better chunk of my work-day

You can set separate MAKEOPTS for different packages via package.env

kimmie · Guru Joined: 08 Sep 2004 Posts: 531 Location: Australia

You are setting PORTAGE_NICENESS in make.conf, right?

Try setting PORTAGE_NICENESS=11

I use this along with MAKEOPTS="-j9 -l8" and EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="--jobs=3"... I can happily watch a video and browse the web while building libreoffice or chromium. Although I'm on an i7 with 12GB ram.

But even on my last pentium-M laptop with 2G ram I could still browse and watch a vid while building. If your processor has 4 cores, try setting MAKEOPTS="-j5 -l4" and EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="--jobs=2". This will keep all cores busy without any thrashing, and along with PORTAGE_NICENESS it shouldn't interfere with your desktop.

If you're still having trouble, you may need to change kernel settings. CONFIG_PREEMPT is bad for throughput, as is CONFIG_HZ_1000. Unless you have special needs CONFIG_HZ_300 is better.

Also, nearly all filesystems start to suck when nearly full, so make sure there's a good amount of room in /var/tmp/portage. I think the libreoffice ebuild requires 6G, make sure it has a couple of gig headroom.

Swap == RAM is good. You're on a laptop right? Suspend/resume works really well....