Emerge is very slow

vladimir_ttt · n00b Joined: 22 Feb 2014 Posts: 2

Hi,

I've started to use gentoo around 11 years ago.
I had Celeron 266MHz processor with 64Mb memory.
Any "emerge" command has run on ot in at most 20-40 sec up to result (without compilation phase).
Now I have computer 40 times faster with 8Gb memory and...

i92guboj · Posted: Sat Feb 22, 2014 9:01 am Post subject:

I guess the answer for both questions is that portage does not a lot more than it used to do ten years ago, specially when it comes to resolving dependencies and blockers.

Times are much shorter, and updates easier to handle, if you keep your system up to date. Otherwise, you have to deal with heavy changes that will no doubt require human intervention to be ironed out.

If you manage to refrain your Ubuntu rush and want to update your machines, I advice you to update sys-apps/portage the first. After that, emerge -auDvN world and paste here the blockers or whatever errors you are getting.

If you still get qt blockers, most of them can be solved by just forcing the update without taking deps into consideration. Then go from there... Something in this line might get you started:

TomWij · Retired Dev Joined: 04 Jul 2012 Posts: 1553

Too much packages, too much overlays, too much unnecessary USE flags, ...; there are various reasons, maybe you are just in a situation that involves a lot of backtracking. Passing --backtrack=0 is as fast as it used to be (30 seconds to me); however, if you do that you need to have quite a skill to resolve things manually (as backtracking resolves things for you). Maybe you could try to slowly lower the backtrack number to see what fits for you? Another heavy consumer of time are the sub slot rebuilds; while you could disable that, it brings you back to having to run `revdep-rebuild` (which, as you might remember, takes up even more time). On a side note, work on Portage has revived; and there are some commits coming up that shave off a bit of time, so, I expect to see the time it costs drop towards the future...

Josef.95 · Advocate Joined: 03 Sep 2007 Posts: 4549 Location: Germany

You should dissolve the Qt libs conflict. (The output of the error message, however, is too short to be able to help)

.........................................................................
On my seven year old computer portage works fine.
(AMD Opteron Processor 185 2x2,6 GHz)

666threesixes666 · Posted: Sun Feb 23, 2014 4:36 am Post subject:

patience is a virtue :twisted:

vladimir_ttt · n00b Joined: 22 Feb 2014 Posts: 2

I've solved the conflicts by

zsitvaij · n00b Joined: 11 Jan 2006 Posts: 74

The main performance killer is subslot tracking. It's an anti-feature that's on by default and offers little over preserved-libs and revdep-rebuild. The only things that come to mind are rebuilding maxima after an sbcl update and qt-core after an icu update, and those give very obvious signs of being broken when they are.

For comparison, on an i3-550@3.2 GHz:

daddio · Posted: Fri May 02, 2014 4:26 am Post subject: horribly slow

Performance truly has become horrific.

It seemed to become much worse about 2 years ago, and has steadily worsened since.

I hope we can get this fixed. Its deeply embarrassing to find dependency generation taking longer in many cases that the compiling.

zsitvaij, thanks for the heads up on subslot tracking... I don't know whether to look at the code, or just turn it off.

John R. Graham · Posted: Fri May 02, 2014 1:21 pm Post subject:

If it automatically resolves more blocks than it used to (and it does), I'm willing to put up with the slowdown within reason. Execution time has gone up & down over the years as features have been added and then subsequently optimized. Nobody makes me sit around and watch the spinner until it's done. All that said, the chances of me switching to Ubuntu (or anything else) because Portage is slow (but reliable) are less than the chance that the proverbial tissue paper dog has of catching the asbestos cat on a romp through Hell.

- John
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Anon-E-moose · Posted: Fri May 02, 2014 1:45 pm Post subject:

time emerge -pvuD --with-bdeps y @world

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!

Total: 0 packages, Size of downloads: 0 kB

real 0m32.966s
user 0m32.296s
sys 0m0.340s

----
time emerge -pve --with-bdeps y @world

Total: 929 packages (929 reinstalls), Size of downloads: 38,588 kB

real 0m31.972s
user 0m31.247s
sys 0m0.378s

I've not noticed any large slowdown, perhaps something else is going on on your system.

Note: It will be a little slower after a fresh boot as nothing will be in memory cache.
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Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

Consider trying a different package manager if Portage is failing you. There's at least two other options.

This is Paludis with 1019 packages and 6 overlays, doing the slowest thing you're likely to see in regular use, equivalent to $(emerge -DpvuN --with-bdeps=y):

yoshi314 · l33t Joined: 30 Dec 2004 Posts: 850 Location: PL

There is also another option, reducing portage size.

Exherbo has small, topical, repositories. One for core system, one for x11, one for hardware support, etc ( list of major ones is here http://git.exherbo.org/summer/ ) . Typical user will install most of them, but it still beats having the whole shebang in one place.
Plus the VDB format seems more efficient, and calculating updates on the installation caches really well and this helps immensely, even if you change use flags in the meantime you still get improved resolution times due to caching of some common vdb files.

Note: this installation uses less repositories, so naturally resolves are faster. Also there is not much installed yet, system is on classic 7200 rpm hdd, on btrfs.

cwr · Veteran Joined: 17 Dec 2005 Posts: 1969

Apparently the general feeling is that Portage hasn't really slowed at all.
I'm not so sure.

See https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1004116-highlight-.html

Will

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

yoshi314 · l33t Joined: 30 Dec 2004 Posts: 850 Location: PL

v_2e · n00b Joined: 28 Dec 2008 Posts: 21

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Sep 22, 2017 8:02 pm Post subject:

v_2e,

USE flags control optional dependencies.
Sometimes, these are whole package trees in their own right, sometimes they are only options to the configure script.

When an unnecessary USE flag turns on a package tree, the dependency resolver has to resolve all the packages that are required by the USE flag.
As well as taking longer to resolve, these unnecessary packages will be compiled and installed on your system.
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