Long pauses during emerges

Message

Caper Diaboli · Post by **Caper Diaboli** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 12:46 am

For a while now I have noticed this utterly baffling behaviour during emerges. While compiling the ebuild, the entire process just.. stops every now and then. Not for every package and not necessarily twice for the same package.. and even if it does, it will most probably happen in a different place. Then again it might do that more than once in one emerge.

Nothing happens in the emerge process during that time, but everything else works just normally. I have never seen that kind of behaviour on anything else except during those emerge compiles. And the duration seems to vary as well, usually around 1-2 minutes. I started to run htop and dstat in the background every time I emerge something. According to those, nothing is hogging up the CPU or IO or anything, the CPU is just twiddling its thumbs while being idle and all emerge related processes are sleeping. The system is otherwise working just normally. Which means that if nothing else is going on, and the emerge has lasted long enough to heat up the CPU, even the fan slows down before the emerge wakes up again.

I can't really say when this has started since I don't usually monitor the emerges, only the results. But since I haven't done any changes to configuration files for a long time, I can be fairly certain that none of that could have caused this.

Just what on earth is going on? I can't even begin to guess where should I start figuring this one out. Anyone got a theory?

mardicas · Post by **mardicas** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 6:27 am

You mean it stops sometimes in the middle of compiling or any other place while emerging?

I doubt that it has something to do with parallel fetch.
Maybe to big ccache or something like that? If the cpu is idle what do the harddrives do?

phajdan.jr · Post by **phajdan.jr** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 12:11 pm

mardicas wrote:I doubt that it has something to do with parallel fetch.

Could be. If portage downloads big file in the background it will stop and you will get no progress bar. But it displays a notice about it anyway (waiting for etc). So, to answer the original question, it is neccessary to know in which stage exactly these pauses happen.

Caper Diaboli · Post by **Caper Diaboli** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 1:14 pm

mardicas wrote:You mean it stops sometimes in the middle of compiling or any other place while emerging?

Exactly, in the middle of compiling. I have never seen it happen before or after the compile stage, and even then not during the initial configure run. Sometimes it happens when ld is being run, sometimes it's gcc/g++. I have even seen it happen on sed and some other commands in a makefile being processed at the moment.

mardicas wrote:I doubt that it has something to do with parallel fetch.

I do have parallel-fetch enabled. But it happens also when there is nothing to fetch, ie. re-emerging something that was emerged earlier or just prefetched using --fetchonly. And shouldn't there be a message like _ph above says?

mardicas wrote:Maybe to big ccache or something like that?

I don't think I have ever even had ccache enabled. I checked my emerge.log and looks like it has never even been emerged on this computer.

mardicas wrote:If the cpu is idle what do the harddrives do?

There isn't any noticeable or unusual hard drive or network activity either. Apart from the emerge that has stalled, it just appears that the computer is doing absolutely nothing except idling...

Caper Diaboli · Post by **Caper Diaboli** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 1:16 pm

I forgot to include this in my first post.. sorry about it.

Code: Select all

Portage 2.1.4.4 (default-linux/x86/2007.0/desktop, gcc-4.1.2, glibc-2.6.1-r0, 2.6.23-tuxonice-r10 i686)
=================================================================
System uname: 2.6.23-tuxonice-r10 i686 Genuine Intel(R) CPU T2300 @ 1.66GHz
Timestamp of tree: Wed, 12 Mar 2008 23:17:01 +0000
distcc 2.18.3 i686-pc-linux-gnu (protocols 1 and 2) (default port 3632) [disabled]
app-shells/bash:     3.2_p17-r1
dev-java/java-config: 1.3.7, 2.1.4
dev-lang/python:     2.4.4-r9
dev-python/pycrypto: 2.0.1-r6
sys-apps/baselayout: 1.12.11.1
sys-apps/sandbox:    1.2.18.1-r2
sys-devel/autoconf:  2.13, 2.61-r1
sys-devel/automake:  1.4_p6, 1.5, 1.6.3, 1.7.9-r1, 1.8.5-r3, 1.9.6-r2, 1.10
sys-devel/binutils:  2.18-r1
sys-devel/gcc-config: 1.4.0-r4
sys-devel/libtool:   1.5.26
virtual/os-headers:  2.6.23-r3
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86"
CBUILD="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-march=prescott -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe"
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/kde/3.5/env /usr/kde/3.5/share/config /usr/kde/3.5/shutdown /usr/share/config"
CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/env.d /etc/env.d/java/ /etc/fonts/fonts.conf /etc/gconf /etc/revdep-rebuild /etc/splash /etc/terminfo /etc/texmf/web2c /etc/udev/rules.d"
CXXFLAGS="-march=prescott -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe"
DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles"
FEATURES="distlocks metadata-transfer parallel-fetch sandbox sfperms strict unmerge-orphans userfetch"
GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://trumpetti.atm.tut.fi/gentoo/ ftp://trumpetti.atm.tut.fi/gentoo/ "
LINGUAS="en fi"
MAKEOPTS="-j3"
PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages"
PORTAGE_RSYNC_OPTS="--recursive --links --safe-links --perms --times --compress --force --whole-file --delete --stats --timeout=180 --exclude=/distfiles --exclude=/local --exclude=/packages"
PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp"
PORTDIR="/usr/portage"
SYNC="rsync://rsync.europe.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage"
USE="X a52 aac acl acpi alsa amr berkdb bluetooth bzip2 cairo cdr cjk cli cpudetection cracklib crypt cups dbus dga directfb dri dvd dvdr dvdread eds emboss encode evo exif fam fbcon ffmpeg firefox flac fortran gcj gdbm gif glitz gphoto2 gpm gstreamer gtk hal haskell iconv ieee1394 imlib ipv6 irda isdnlog javascript jpeg jpeg2k kde kerberos laptop ldap mad matroska mbox midi mikmod mmx mmxext mp3 mpeg mudflap ncurses nls nptl nptlonly ogg openal opengl openmp oss pam pcmcia pcre pda pdf perl png pppd python qt3 qt3support qt4 quicktime readline reflection rtc ruby samba sdl session spell spl sse sse2 ssl svg tcpd theora threads tiff truetype unicode usb v4l v4l2 vorbis wifi win32codecs x264 x86 xcomposite xine xml xorg xv xvid zlib" ALSA_CARDS="hda-intel" ALSA_PCM_PLUGINS="adpcm alaw asym copy dmix dshare dsnoop empty extplug file hooks iec958 ioplug ladspa lfloat linear meter mulaw multi null plug rate route share shm softvol" APACHE2_MODULES="actions alias auth_basic authn_alias authn_anon authn_dbm authn_default authn_file authz_dbm authz_default authz_groupfile authz_host authz_owner authz_user autoindex cache dav dav_fs dav_lock deflate dir disk_cache env expires ext_filter file_cache filter headers include info log_config logio mem_cache mime mime_magic negotiation rewrite setenvif speling status unique_id userdir usertrack vhost_alias" ELIBC="glibc" INPUT_DEVICES="keyboard synaptics mouse" KERNEL="linux" LCD_DEVICES="bayrad cfontz cfontz633 glk hd44780 lb216 lcdm001 mtxorb ncurses text" LINGUAS="en fi" USERLAND="GNU" VIDEO_CARDS="i810"
Unset:  CPPFLAGS, CTARGET, EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS, INSTALL_MASK, LANG, LC_ALL, LDFLAGS, PORTAGE_COMPRESS, PORTAGE_COMPRESS_FLAGS, PORTAGE_RSYNC_EXTRA_OPTS, PORTDIR_OVERLAY

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