OE and SSDs

OE and SSDs

[Carlos Rafael Giani]

Hello,

we are considering purchasing SSDs for our development machines, for 
faster I/O and better latency. One open question is whether to buy TLC- 
or MLC-based drives. TLCs are considerably cheaper. They would not be 
used in build bots, but on the other hand, people will build entire 
images with OE by themselves during development.

So I wonder about the impact on the drive's lifespan, and whether or not 
it is severe enough to warrant the more expensive MLC drives (up to 2 
times more expensive).

Did anybody made experiences with these? Any recommendations?

Re: OE and SSDs

[Philip Balister]

On 02/13/2014 05:38 AM, Carlos Rafael Giani wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> we are considering purchasing SSDs for our development machines, for
> faster I/O and better latency. One open question is whether to buy TLC-
> or MLC-based drives. TLCs are considerably cheaper. They would not be
> used in build bots, but on the other hand, people will build entire
> images with OE by themselves during development.
> 
> So I wonder about the impact on the drive's lifespan, and whether or not
> it is severe enough to warrant the more expensive MLC drives (up to 2
> times more expensive).
> 
> Did anybody made experiences with these? Any recommendations?

A lot of people use as much ram as they can fit in the box and use
tmpfs'. You might try that approach first.

Philip

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> 

Re: OE and SSDs

[Sander van Grieken]

 
On Thursday, February 13, 2014 18:00 CET, Philip Balister <philip@balister.org> wrote: 
> On 02/13/2014 05:38 AM, Carlos Rafael Giani wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > we are considering purchasing SSDs for our development machines, for
> > faster I/O and better latency. One open question is whether to buy TLC-
> > or MLC-based drives. TLCs are considerably cheaper. They would not be
> > used in build bots, but on the other hand, people will build entire
> > images with OE by themselves during development.
> > 
> > So I wonder about the impact on the drive's lifespan, and whether or not
> > it is severe enough to warrant the more expensive MLC drives (up to 2
> > times more expensive).
> > 
> > Did anybody made experiences with these? Any recommendations?
> 
> A lot of people use as much ram as they can fit in the box and use
> tmpfs'. You might try that approach first.

It might be interesting to in some way integrate this behaviour automatically, if an FS-on-SSD is detected and plenty of RAM is present. For instance, if INHERIT+="rm_work" is set, the build directory could be automatically overlayed using aufs/unionfs, since the intermediate result in the build directory is then by definition irrelevant after a succesful build.

I have no idea though, what the minimum amount of free memory would need to be to be sure that none of the bigger builds fail. 

Regards,
Sander