mitigations for overheating?

[bzipitidoo]

The biggest problem I'm having with Gentoo is that my hardware can't take hours of sustained building without overheating, and locking up hard. 2 hours, yes, it can sustain that, but not 8 hours, can't leave it running all night long doing builds.

To get a big package such as Chromium to finish building, I have resorted to an old trick of using ctrl-s to pause the terminal output and thus the build for an hour or so, to give the computer a chance to cool down. (ctrl-q resumes.) If I don't do that in time, and end up having to cut the power, then when the computer has recovered the Gentoo build system starts over on the big package. Is there any way to resume within a package build? It's painful to have reached 40,000 out of nearly 60,000 tasks on the building of Chromium, and have to start over because the computer overheated at that point.

[sbeem]

According to https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-792914.html you can just:

[molletts]

Have you tried reducing the number of threads in use for those packages (you can use files in /etc/portage/env and /etc/portage/package.env to override MAKEOPTS for specific packages)? That should reduce the power dissipation of the CPU a bit and may help keep the temperature under control. I have to limit ffmpeg runs (which can produce considerably more heat than compile jobs, maybe due to the use of AVX instructions) to 6 or even 4 threads in hot weather to prevent my PC from overheating.

I assume there's nothing you can do to improve cooling. (If it's a laptop, have you tried using a laptop cooler?)

Stephen

[NeddySeagoon]

[JustAnother]

First, go inside and blow out the dust. Don't overrev the fan blade (back emf effect).

If it is a laptop, get a stand with a large 6" fan. Spins slower, and is quieter, and the wear rate scales a a power of the spin rate.

And/or: use some 1x2 wood or erasers to prop the laptop at least half an inch off any surface.
If you have a stand, make sure the stand is propped up the same amount.

A cheap USB fan could blow air under the stand and possibly help.

If it is a desktop, install another fan.

[Genone]

Depending on your hardware, potentially just reduce the thermal and/or power limits of your CPU. Modern LGA1700 boards in particular tend to ignore Intels specs for those limits and will happily let the CPUs consume as much power as possible for as long as they want, which obviously results in tons of heat.
Other than that, check your cooling solution: in case of a desktop, clean the case, coolers and fans from dust, if it is an older system maybe dismount the cooler and apply some new thermal paste. Or add some additional fans to get the heat out of the system.
If it is a laptop then obviously your options are more limited, still removing dust and ensuring air intake and outlets are free may help.

As for reducing load, as has been mentioned you could simply reduce the number of parallel build jobs.

[figueroa]

You can lower these settings in /etc/portage/make.conf

[pa4wdh]

Some time ago i had a similar problem, only in my case the CPU/mainboard was fanless.

I wrote a small daemon to scale down the cpufreq max frequency depending on the CPU temperature, right now it keeps my CPU around 70 degrees Celsius while the emerge -e world is running for the 23.0 profile update.
It might be useful for your use case too, you can find it here: https://code.pa4wdh.nl.eu.org/tools/cputemp2maxfreq/about/
_________________
The gentoo way of bringing peace to the world:
USE="-war" emerge --newuse @world

My shared code repository: https://code.pa4wdh.nl.eu.org
Music, Free as in Freedom: https://www.jamendo.com

[Hu]

Nice only encourages the system to prefer scheduling other applications more favorably than the nice one. A nice process with no competition can still run the system at full load.

[figueroa]

[Ralphred]