I've got a gentoo box at home and a gentoo linode.

Dependency checking on my box at home is significantly slower than on my linode... like by an order of magnitude or more.

The box at home has a lot more available memory.

It's hard to make any kind of real comparison between the CPU's, bexause if nobody is using all the cpu on my linode host there is a bunch of power sitting there. My box at home isn't exactly slow though.

model name : AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 955 Processor
cpu MHz : 3200.000



The storage is probably the biggest difference. I'm guessing you guys have some pretty strong SAS based SANs providing the storage. My OS drive (and portages home) is a 10k rpm velociraptor SATA drive.

But still... 10x - 15x times performance?


Have you guys put some secret sauce into the mix? Tweaked portage in some way?

Any tips on things I could do with my home box to improve dependency calculation ould be greatly appreciated.

I would be quite surprised if the Gentoo image differs noticeably from the "defaults." Portage will be stock, and I'd actually be surprised if the compiler settings are tweaked significantly.

For many many tasks, I/O performance is significantly more important than CPU performance. Digging through piles of data is one of those tasks.

The trick? No SAN. Local storage, most likely 15k SAS. Throw in a hardware RAID controller, with fat read caches and battery backup'd write cache, and many of the limitations of rotating magnetic storage start to become less significant...

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Also I think the Linode Gentoo image comes with a slightly changed /etc/make.conf which sets a value to MAKEOPTS= which will tell portage to use more cpu cores when emerging stuff which may explain why things build faster too.