This will REDUCE compile times!!!!

[Tristan469]

I posted this in another thread but I felt that I should post it on it's own just because.. Any comments or additions are entirely welcome... Flames, however; are not! =)

For anyone that isn't really familiar with Linux, here is a great way to speed up compile times..
KILL X!!!!! (X being the gui environment)
Anytime I have to compile anything, I switch to a command window (ctrl+alt+F1), login and then do a
/sbin/telinit 3
This will switch the run level of your system to just above bare minimum... Some times I have to go kill X manually with an app called TOP...
type at the command line->
top
and then wait... you will see a bunch of prcesses in a list..
press the letter 'k' and it will ask for a PID (process ID) then look in the list and get the PID of "X".. it will be listed under the command column.. Enter the PID, hit enter and then it will ask for a signal to use... simply type '-9' and hit enter... X is now shut down... type q and then follow the guide to compile eveything...
Once you're done, and want to switch your run level back to normal, type
/sbin/telinit 5
then press ctrl+alt+F7 to take you to the gui login..
This works for RedHat and Mandrake and maybe others.. I have both mandrake8.1 and redhat7.1 installed on two sperate machines both running SEQ for my two window's boxes..
hope this helps someone...

[ahminus]

I suspect you must not have much memory.

X shouldn't make any difference... after even a short period of time on a machine with a goodly amount of memory (256M or more) all the relevant pages will be swapped in and compile times would be more or less dependent on your CPU, memory timing, and hard drive (lower latency == better... if you want fast compiles, buy 15,000 RPM SCSI drive).

If you're noticing a large difference in compile times with X running and without X, it's probably due to the fact that you're swapping excessively.

It probably wouldn't hurt to spend $10 on a 128M DIMM :)

That's not to say X isn't a bloated pile of crud. It is. :)

[Tristan469]

Well, when you're running a 166 with 32 megs of ram, you need all the help you can get. I could buy a 256meg strip of pc133 ram for the cost of another 32 megs for my old PoS linux box so I'll stick with killing X all the time.. it really isn't that big of a deal to me. But you are correct that it will make -less- of a difference on faster machines with more ram...

Cheers,

[winseq]

I dunno about seq, but for qt it might help if there was some way to turn off tutorials and examples in the compile...

[RavenCT]

Buy more RAM? I would love too, really... now if I could figure out a way that the BIOS would recognize it....

Cheap *(@#*$ing Compaq Presario 4540 has a max RAM limit of 48 MB.... That's what really sucks...

Maybe one of these days I'll go to a computer show and pick up a low end celeron kit for $100....