Benchmarks Of The Gentoo-Based Calculate Linux

Having used Gentoo for seven years, I can say the only 'speed' I care about, the only thing which should be fast, is compiling new software!

Because after all, waiting for bzip or lame to complete, is only a tiny fragment of the time one spents waiting before the world has been updated. Try compiling 1GB of downloaded zipped source code and you'll understand, ahem.

Sabayon and Calculate users prevent that problem though, it seems.

Hans, do you put the "emerge" build space into its own volume? My scant experience with Gentoo says that's the #1 way to keep the main volumes from getting fragmented. That, or else make them all XFS, which seems a bit overkill.

Var is on its own partition (I was taught partitioning in OpenBSD, hence my 'desktop' has server-like partitioning), which on turn is an LVM LV on a VG on a software-RAID0 array of 3 disks (used to have 4, but 1 sadly broke and not replaced). If I really want some 'emerge' speed, I use tmpfs mapped to RAM (for large compile efforts it doesn't work as I can only have 3GB RAM).

XFS - I have never tried though, but your recent remarks about it beating most other FS'es does make me curious.

Some things with XFS - decreasing the size of the partition - are not impossible IIRC, so that's what kept me from using it.

Another advantage of XFS is xfs_fsr, the file system reorganizer. Eight years ago it was broken, but it's feeling much better now.