pbuilder performance

[Dmitrijs Ledkovs]

On 17 November 2012 18:33, Enrico Weigelt <enrico.weigelt at vnc.biz> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I'm regularily building quite huge packages with large dependencies,
> eg. libreoffice, using git-buildpackage. And it's really slow.
>
> Is there any way for speeding up the builds ?
>
> I'm already using cowbuilder, but it only seems to be able to use
> an existing base system tree, while still needs installing all
> the dependencies one by one.
>
> Is it possible to do some similar logic with dependencies ?
> (something like an tweaked dpkg that fetches everything from
> per-package directories instead *.dpkg files and just hardlink
> instead of copying) ?
>

* use eatmydata
* use local caching proxy (apt-cacher-ng)

eatmydata - reduces IO by faking fsync which speeds up dpkg install a
lot (note this may result in e.g. test-suite failures which rely on
fsync)

apt-cacher-ng starts a local proxy on your machine, which can be used
as an apt-proxy or even as a "full" mirror, if it doesn't have
packages cached it simply gets them over the network. For a common set
of regular builds that greatly speeds up things.

use sbuild, it's faster. there is a handy mk-sbuild utility in
ubuntu-dev-tools that can create schroots for you (it even has a handy
eatmydata option).

you either want a clean environment, or you don't ;-) so you do have
to pay for a clean room.

Regards,

Dmitrijs.