Bug 155484 – PORTAGE_NICENESS not honored during global update stage.

• Product: Portage Development
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description Duncan 2006-11-17 06:46:41 UTC]

portage-2.1.2-rc1-r7

Portage doesn't appear to honor PORTAGE_NICENESS during the "Performing Global Updates: <$PORTDIR>/profiles/updates/<quarter>" stage.  I have PORTAGE_NICENESS set to 19, and ksysguard monitoring sys/app/nice CPU usage.  While I normally see a mass of yellow (niced cycles) activity while portage is running, it goes nearly solid blue (application cycles) during the global update stage.  Note that newer portage update speed has improved to the point where it was actually practical to add FEATURES=fixpackages, as I have -- it's just not nicing it in accordance with the settings in make.conf, as it does with pretty much everything else it does.

What prompted me to look up and see what was happening was my Internet radio stream suddenly went jerky.  That doesn't normally happen, even with high (double digit) load averages, when portage is running niced, but whatever it launches to do the updates apparently doesn't honor the niceness settings, as demonstrated by the immediate leap in un-niced process activity when the updates run.

I /think/ the same issue may exist when syncing, as I noticed something a bit odd during the sync as well, but I can't be sure on that.  I'm quite sure on the global updates, as the timing of both the start and end of the spike in "application" activity coincided with the start and end of the global updates stage.

[Comment 1 Duncan 2006-11-17 06:54:23 UTC]

Created attachment 102205 [details]
emerge --info

Umm... make that -r6, I had just synced and noticed the issue when I did my first emerge, to -r7.  Here's emerge --info

[Comment 2 Zac Medico 2006-11-17 07:03:46 UTC]

Thanks, this is fixed in svn r5071.

[Comment 3 Zac Medico 2006-11-17 20:54:21 UTC]

This has been released in 2.1.2_rc2.