Help me manage my RAM!!

[LegionOfHell]

I have an i7-7700HQ[8 threads] + 32 GB of RAM...

(1) I want to be able to use the computer while emerge is updating thew system...so I set -j=6 and I will need 12GB of RAM for -j=6

(3) I want to put "/var/tmp/portage" to tmpfs. I am planning to put size=19G in the fstab line...

(4) I will install the following: Xorg, qutebrowser, Qtile, vim, notepadqq .. etc

Is my setup correct ? or should I change something ?

[389292]

I have 24GB of RAM and -j11 of threads (12 total), and ~16GB for tmpfs (70% of RAM), never had an emerge failing on me (though I didn't try something like chromium). Try watching a video or doing your desired work when emerging with -j7, it should be totally fine, I think 6 is too conservative, your RAM is not going to be a problem.

[The Doctor]

Well, first off that jobs flag isn't really going to be that important. It is rare that portage can build too many packages at once anyway, so -j=6 is fine. You probably will only see it use that option a few times.

Putting /var/tmp/portage in a tmp file is a good idea. 19G? Sure, why not. 9 or 10 would probably be sufficient but you have the ram so no harm in giving it more. Never ran into anything that complained other than icedtea. The foot print here is a lot less than you expect and you are just setting a maximum size here.

Then there is the real problem. What do you mean by use the computer? Are you watching "cat" videos or running a data analysis of the stock market to predict what to invest in? What is usable is going to change quite dramatically depending.

Your setup is perfectly fine. You shouldn't notice anything updating, but that depends on what you are actually doing. We used to build on computers with 62 MiB of ram. Those boxes could only handle one thing at a time. Not much has changed since then in the building department. The hardware has changed quite a bit. Basically, try it and see if it works for you since no one can tell what you consider usable.

Okay, now that I wrote all that I threw you a bone here. Chances are that portage will be just fine out of the box, but...

What you can do if you want a more responsive computer is specify how nice portage should be. As in, playing with the PORTAGE_NICENESS value. <waves hand>This is the parameter you are looking for</wave>

I'll leave research of this parameter and what it does as an exercise to the reader
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First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box.

[NeddySeagoon]

LegionOfHell,

[Anon-E-moose]

What I do, if emerging while running X is to drop the # of cpus by a couple (yeah, it takes slightly longer but the desktop is usable while emerging)
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PRIME x570-pro, 3700x, 6.1 zen kernel
gcc 13, profile 17.0 (custom bare multilib), openrc, wayland

[Spirch]

in my case i'm planning to fresh install in the next 2 weeks

ryzen 3900x and 32 gig of ram, having 24 threads and wanting to save my ssd mean using ram that might be useful while compiling

in my case, i wounder how much job should i limit, i should have gone with 64 gig of ram but price is way too high right now to get the extra 32 gig

should i limit job at 12 / 16 while allowing tmpfs to go up to 12-16 gig of ram?

what would you recommend?

[Tony0945]

Ryzen 2700X (8 core) and 32G memory. Allocating 16G to /dev/shm and using -j16
No problem web surfing or reading e-mail while doing world updates.

Maybe gaming would be a problem. I don't game.

Probably could allocate more memory to /dev/shm but not using it all anyway.
My biggest builds are gcc and palemoon. palemoon requires 9G RAM.
IIRC both build in around 9 minutes with on-demand governor. I should switch to performance governor for builds. The temps hardly rise and speed keeps dropping back to 50%.

[The Doctor]

For a fresh install there is no need to really worry about a limit. 32 Gig of ram is enough so your tmpfs will never fill up and as I said before portage is more or less self limiting due to the dependencies of packages. You should always use a tmpfs these days because 1) it saves the SSD 2) it speeds up the process 3) it automatically handles cleanup of failed builds when you reboot. The disadvantage is that it automatically cleans up failed builds on reboot.

I recommend you just go for it. You will know if your computer is biting off more than it can chew. Building packages really isn't nearly as taxing as it used to be. I used to do this with 62 MiB, that is MiB, of ram. If I can build X on that your box isn't going to have a problem with multiple builds at the same time. I could do normal text and web tasks with 512 MiB and a single build. With 16 GiB the only things I can't do well is video editing and minecraft, and I'm letting portage make full use of parallelism. With 32 GiB I don't really see much difference at all except that my tmpfs doesn't throw a fit about libreoffice or icedtea. I hope that trip down memory lane helps!
_________________
First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box.

[Spirch]

[Tony0945]

Spirch, how hot did it get?
Last time I tried something like that (not with a Ryzen), temps got up to 210F then the computer shutdown.

[Spirch]