Minimizing emerge impact on a low-mem/high load system?

Question

Any best practices on minimizing system performance impact during emerging?

Answer 1

you can set the variable PORTAGE_NICENESS in the file /etc/make.conf. it sums up a nice value to the emerge process, so that it has less priority on the system. for example:

PORTAGE_NICENESS=10

the above line, in /etc/make.conf, will make portage increment 10 to the default nice value for that process (this will not set the nice value to 10, it will increment that value).

Answer 2

You could always use a different system to do the hard work using distcc: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/distcc.xml

Answer 3

Apart from setting PORTAGE_NICENESS Use ionice to reduce impact on hard disk and reduce impact on user.

For example, for installing evolution I would do:

ionice -c3 emerge -av evolution

Answer 4

Try cpulimit. It limits cpu usage per process. So, you can tell emerge to use only 10% of your cpu resources.

Answer 5

@Mark's answer of using distcc sound sgood. Creating binary packages on another system and installing them on the high-load system might be an alternative approach to that one.