portage niceness [Solved]

[kodiakmax]

I seem to be having issues with emerge taking over my system. It does not matter if make.conf portage_niceness is set to -8 or -19 When I use Opera I get lag watching video's and even as I type this message my cursor lags and I have to wait for it to catch up. mplayer also skips when playing mp3s I even tried to renice mplayer to 5 but it didn't help. the "cc1plus" processes take up the top 3 spots when I check "top". I don't use portage all that often but when I do it is really annoying that I can't surf the internet without waiting for my browser to catchup. Or listen to music because the skips drive me up the wall. I tried firefox and it is not quite as bad. however firefox eats 18-20% of my cpu normally where opera only uses about 4% with the same tabs open. I imagine that probably has something to do with some of my extensions in firefox. Anyway I'm getting a little off track here.
Any idea why portage_niceness might not be taking effect?

I have a Core2 T7500 2.2GHz CPU with 4GB RAM

[tomv]

You mean PORTAGE_NICENESS? I believe it's case sensitive. As a check, run "top" in a terminal and ensure in the "NI" (niceness) column matches PORTAGE_NICENESS.

[WarraWarra]

It should look similar to this below to work:

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ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86"
LINGUAS="en_US"
MAKEOPTS="-j16 -s "
PORTAGE_NICENESS="19"
FEATURES="parallel-fetch collision-protect buildpkg fixpackage"
source /usr/local/portage/layman/make.conf


No idea why "source" is smalls but works fine.

Runs nice and smooth with 1gb v-ram in vmware or with 2gb actual ram. + swap space .

PS> if you have layman -S that syncs sabayon you can delete /etc/make.conf after you replaced the /usr/local/portage/layman/make.conf with the edit /etc/make.conf as portage will only read from this one and not /etc/make.conf and if both is the same it will cry like a baby , layman gets first priority and if not there then will use /etc/make.conf .

[tomv]

No idea why "source" is smalls but works fine.

"source /path/to/file" is (analogous to) a standard UNIX command which includes the contents of file into a shell script upon execution, whereas the other things in make.conf are variables which are by convention UPPER_CASE. On the command-line, "source file" executes the commands in file using the current shell which is useful for executing commands in a file to which you do not have execute permissions.

PS> if you have layman -S that syncs sabayon you can delete /etc/make.conf after you replaced the /usr/local/portage/layman/make.conf with the edit /etc/make.conf as portage will only read from this one and not /etc/make.conf and if both is the same it will cry like a baby , layman gets first priority and if not there then will use /etc/make.conf.

The "source /path/to/file" line in /etc/make.conf inserts the contents of file into /etc/make.conf at that point. Thus, any variables defined above this line and also defined in file would be overridden, however all variables defined below it would be unaffected - basically, the last definition of a variable sticks.

Are you sure you can delete /etc/make.conf? Unless emerge/layman have functionality I'm unaware of, emerge only reads from /etc/make.conf (which can source other files, such as /usr/local/portage/layman/make.conf as in your example).

[WarraWarra]

I should have phrased it slightly differently more like if error then can do this and still be okay.

Had to delete my /etc/make.conf as it complained and works fine with only laymans make.conf Maybe I am missing the pot here LOL

Yup I found this strange as well but had to just to get past this errors messages, Please advise about this , about to do a clean install on another hard drive and would like to bypass this error if possible or incorrect.

This could be a side effect of something else python 2.6.2 related ? Also running git and gcc 4.3.3-r2

Error's:

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tweak etc # ls mak*
ls: cannot access make.conf: Too many levels of symbolic links

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open('/etc/make.conf', 'r'): [Errno 40] Too many levels of symbolic links: '/etc/make.conf'

[tomv]

I don't think your issue would be caused by python, git, gcc, etc. After following symbolic links for too long, the system gives up and returns an error like the one you mentioned. I'd guess you created a symbolic link loop somewhere in your filesystem. Maybe you linked file1 -> file2 and file2 -> file1?

[kodiakmax]

well, I did mean PORTAGE_NICENESS in upper caps, I just wrote it in lower case sorry about that. I had originally edited the /etc/make.conf I was unware of the /usr/local/portage/layman/make.conf So, I will try changing the layman make.conf and see if that makes a difference.

**edit Not sure what it was but after a recent update it appears to be working properly again.