So my 192Meg RAM Linode on Host6 took six hours to compile glibc
while doing basically nothing else.

Since this is my first experience with Linux, Gento and compiling GNU
software (but not compiling in general), does this mean:

1. Linodes are disk bound, as I've heard.
2. Compiling is a disk-intensive activity.
3. Host6 was pretty busy Wednesday.
4. Gentoo is not the best choice for a Linode.
5. 192Megs RAM is too little for compiling.
6. I should stop updating my software so frequently.
7. Something's wrong somewhere.
8. All of the above.

I missed saving an SSH session observing the later stages but
I can say that my load average was above 2, top reported most
kernel processes in SW state, and I still had 3-13 Megs free RAM,
per top and free.

The build finished fine. I know I've built this more than once since
getting my Linode and I know it never took this long.

I'd appreciate any and all comments. I'm here to learn.

Thanks,
Wes

oh. so yer the one futzing up host6! (joking)... six hours isn't unexpected. glibc is a large beast.

-e

Am NOT!

Thanks for the comment -- I don't have any baseline for this stuff
since I've got no desktop box experience to compare it with. Anyway,
I rebooted to the latest kernel and the occasional compile seems
snappier now.

Host6 is showing signs of use though, like pauses in SSH sessions
and sluggishness parsing man pages, but I ain't doing it.

Except for my once-a-week-or-so compile of Gentoo stuff, it's at load 0.
Apache's using something like 7-thousandths of the CPU!

lol.... host6 is basically ok for me except for one known issue to-be-resolved-on-the-next-host6-reboot relating to networking. Everything else seems decently snappy for a smallish system. I can't complain too much.

My personal machines are, at minimum, 2.8Ghz processors tho... so I don't expect a lot of overall performance from the UML.

-e

Some of us have low expectations, period -- I'm posting this from an iMac with a whizzy 400MHz PPC (not mine : ) ).

I can get a cup of coffee before some menus drop...

I've got no real complaints about my Linode. I think about it very fondly and probably would have given it a cute hostname if I didn't think it'd haunt me someday in tough-guy sysadmin circles.

Imagine Chris reading the request to reverse-DNS my host to "fluffball".

mine is named dorothy