pbuilder performance

[Paul Graydon]

On 11/17/2012 09:10 AM, Dmitrijs Ledkovs wrote:
> 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.
>
If you're routinely rebuilding packages, you may see some benefit in 
using ccache as well.  There are some instructions in the sbuild page on 
how to utilise it: http://wiki.debian.org/sbuild

Paul