Re: How to speed up 'automake'

[Jan Engelhardt]

On Friday 2022-04-29 22:59, Thomas Jahns wrote:
> On 4/27/22 3:49 PM, R. Diez wrote:
>> Is there a way to speed 'automake' up?
>
> While you are probably looking for system-independent advice, the best results
> I've had with speeding up ephemeral builds is to simply use /dev/shm for
> backing storage on Linux, i.e. first try to put build directories there
> ($XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is also fine on modern Linux). If the installation is not
> needed later on, you can also put the installation path there.

There ought to be little difference, both use the page cache, except
that using tmpfs carries the usual volatility risks (not backed by a
real device, susceptible to power loss, etc., blocks other serious
processes from using resources, and tmpfs objects may get moved to
swapspace, which isn't great at all considering you get to pick up
pieces from the swap partition in the event of a power loss.)

tmpfs may be interesting from a psychological point of view and/or
when there are a *lot* of files. But automake, that's nowhere near as
IO-heavy as untarring kernel source archives. It's much more
a CPU-bound task.