On 2025-07-24, Javier Martinez wrote:

El 24/7/25 a las 16:43, Rahul Sandhu escribió:

Hi Dale,

That's the biggest reason I have portage's work directory on tmpfs.  If >>> I start having to do it on a disk because of a lack of memory, I'll do
it on spinning rust to save my m.2 stick.

This really isn't all that true these days, please take a look at the
Gentoo wiki article for Portage TMPDIR on tmpfs, which states[1]:

Users are strongly cautioned against buying additional RAM to use as tmpfs. >>

[1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Portage_TMPDIR_on_tmpfs

Regards,
Rahul

Its not question of thuth if not opinions instead, and neither to buy
more RAM modules but to take a computer with enough RAM from the
beginning (I will try the next one having 64 GB).

I don't have swap on disk. And got a system with 32 gb of RAM. I
dedicate 16 of them to /var/tmp/portage. My PC could die and the
harddisk still alive to be used in another system (such as rockpi4c+)

If you don't use RAM as tmpfs maybe your harddisk will live 5 years,
if it's almost full don't so many years according of the TBW of each
hardisk.

I think hard drives tend to usually last way longer than that, including
those used on Gentoo systems and which house /var/tmp/portage.

So, is not buy more RAM, is question to get from the beginning enough
RAM to be able to protect your SSD disk. You can also put your
distfiles dir in tmpfs use --jobs 1 and got it to remove it after
emerging.

Less writtings more lifespan and gentoo does so many writes when
emerging.

Maybe a separate on-disk filesystem with very lazy writeback is a more appropriate solution for this?

--
Nuno Silva

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Thursday, 24 July 2025 19:17:10 British Summer Time Javier Martinez wrote:

El 24/7/25 a las 19:56, Immolo escribió:

If you don't use RAM as tmpfs maybe your harddisk will live 5 years,

I must have some defective drives or something as my IDE drives from the 90s are still going.....

As for nvmes, I brought mine in 2017 and is currently showing `Data
Units Written : 192018934 (98.31 TB)`
I don't do anything too intense, just a weekly emptyree rebuild of world using the latest GCC snapshot to help track early bugs.

If you are worried about earlier SSDs then my little 60GB SSD I bought
in 2008 is also doing fine as a Gentoo machine rootfs.

If you have any other questions about hardware life cycles then please free to ask.

immolo

IDE are mechanicals units, his lifespan depends entirely of mechanics components, SSD not. It can be a cuestion of luck, but I have lost a lot
of drives, most of them standard mechanics IDE,SATA drives.

Lastly one SEAGATE of two TB mechanic bought at the same time that one
SSD of 512GB died. The SSD not yet, but the SEAGATE had a lot more use
than the other. I protected this SSD from writings but as you can see:

Data Units Read: 78.061.867 [39,9 TB]
Data Units Written: 35.723.270 [18,2 TB]

It has his work done

If you protect your drives his lifespans will get increased. But you
have to take care of them

I tend to keep my disks until they die and can no longer cajole them back into a healthy working order. I can afford to lose a HDD, I have many, but with SSDs I try to prolong their life. The first OCZ 240GB MLC SSD I bought lasted over 11 years, because I used a tmpfs for /var/tmp/portage and a HDD for /var/ cache, /var/db and swap. Given OCZ drives lasted 3-5 years, if they hadn't died well before this because of the infamous Sandforce controller firmware problem, I think it performed rather well.

For people who replace their PC and/or their drives every couple of years this will be less of a concern.
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--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 2025-07-24, Javier Martinez wrote:

El 24/7/25 a las 18:07, Nuno Silva escribió:

On 2025-07-24, Javier Martinez wrote:

El 24/7/25 a las 16:43, Rahul Sandhu escribió:

Hi Dale,

That's the biggest reason I have portage's work directory on tmpfs.  If >>>>> I start having to do it on a disk because of a lack of memory, I'll do >>>>> it on spinning rust to save my m.2 stick.

This really isn't all that true these days, please take a look at the
Gentoo wiki article for Portage TMPDIR on tmpfs, which states[1]:

Users are strongly cautioned against buying additional RAM to use as tmpfs.

[1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Portage_TMPDIR_on_tmpfs

Regards,
Rahul

Its not question of thuth if not opinions instead, and neither to buy
more RAM modules but to take a computer with enough RAM from the
beginning (I will try the next one having 64 GB).

I don't have swap on disk. And got a system with 32 gb of RAM. I
dedicate 16 of them to /var/tmp/portage. My PC could die and the
harddisk still alive to be used in another system (such as rockpi4c+)

If you don't use RAM as tmpfs maybe your harddisk will live 5 years,
if it's almost full don't so many years according of the TBW of each
hardisk.

I think hard drives tend to usually last way longer than that, including
those used on Gentoo systems and which house /var/tmp/portage.

So, is not buy more RAM, is question to get from the beginning enough
RAM to be able to protect your SSD disk. You can also put your
distfiles dir in tmpfs use --jobs 1 and got it to remove it after
emerging.

Less writtings more lifespan and gentoo does so many writes when
emerging.

Maybe a separate on-disk filesystem with very lazy writeback is a more
appropriate solution for this?

How many RAM modules have you broken in your life by excessive use? I
did not break any yet, hard disks a lot

Why are you assign /tmp or /run a tmpfs directory? is a no sense for me.

Data that would not be keeped between reboots should not be written to
a disk which dies slowly with each byte-written

If you have /tmp in RAM is a no sense to defend /var/tmp/portage in
disk. I agree that you SHALL NOT buy RAM expansions to your PC to do
it as it can be cheaper one m2 hard disk. But if you have RAM use RAM
and protect your disks.

There have certainly been times when buying RAM wasn't really
financially worth it compared to just buying more hard disk space. That
*may* now change if RAM is sufficiently cheaper, and for systems where
RAM modules are easily available, given that several hard disk
manufacturers are replacing the more affordable hard disk tiers with
SMR-only offerings, meaning the price tag for "CMR" disks ends up being
higher.

There have also been times when the motherboard simply could not take
more RAM. I have one amd64 system where I can't use more than
3-something GiB - chipset limitation on the address space puts the
maximum at 4 GiB, and on top of that it still has to include the PCI
hole. (Thanks, Intel!)



(You do understand that if /var/tmp/portage is in disk, then it is
*also* in RAM?)

--
Nuno Silva

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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