1. Introduction §

I always wondered how to make packages building faster. There are at least two easy tricks available: storing temporary data into RAM and caching build objects.

Caching build objects can be done with ccache, it will intercept cc and c++ calls (the programs compiling C/C++ files) and depending on the inputs will reuse a previously built object if available or build normally and store the result for potential next reuse. It has nearly no use when you build software only once because it requires objects to be cached before being useful. It obviously doesn't work for non C/C++ programs.

The other trick is using a temporary filesystem stored in memory (RAM), on OpenBSD we will use mfs but on Linux or FreeBSD you could use tmpfs. The difference between those two is mfs will reserve the given memory usage while tmpfs is faster and won't reserve the memory of its filesystem (which has pros and cons).

So, I decided to measure the build time of the Gemini browser Lagrange in three cases: without ccache, with ccache but first build so it doesn't have any cached objects and with ccache with objects in it. I did these three tests multiple time because I also wanted to measure the impact of using memory base filesystem or the old spinning disk drive in my computer, this made a lot of tests because I tried with ccache on mfs and package build objects (later referenced as pobj) on mfs, then one on hdd and the other on mfs and so on.

To proceed, I compiled net/lagrange using dpb after cleaning the lagrange package generated everytime. Using dpb made measurement a lot easier and the setup was reliable. It added some overhead when checking dependencies (that were already installed in the chroot) but the point was to compare the time difference between various tweaks.

2. Results numbers §

Here are the results, raw and with a graphical view. I did run multiples time the same test sometimes to see if the result dispersion was huge, but it was reliable at +/- 1 second.

Type			Duration for second build	Duration with empty cache
ccache mfs + pobj mfs	60				133
ccache mfs + pobj hdd	63				130
ccache hdd + pobj mfs	61				127
ccache hdd + pobj hdd	68				137
 no ccache + pobj mfs					124
 no ccache + pobj hdd					128

3. Results analysis §

At first glance, we can see that not using ccache results in builds a bit faster, so ccache definitely has a very small performance impact when there is no cached objects.

Then, we can see results are really tied together, except for the ccache and pobj both on the hdd which is the slowest combination by far compared to the others times differences.

4. Problems encountered §

My building system has 16 GB of memory and 4 cores, I want builds to be as fast as possible so I use the 4 cores, for some programs using Rust for compilation (like Firefox), more than 8 GB of memory (4x 2GB) is required because of Rust and I need to keep a lot of memory available. I tried to build it once with 10GB of mfs filesystem but when packaging it did reach the filesystem limit and fail, it also swapped during the build process.

When using a 8GB mfs for pobj, I've been hitting the limit which induced build failures, building four ports in parallel can take some disk space, especially at package time when it copies the result. It's not always easy to store everything in memory.

I decided to go with a 3 GB ccache over MFS and keep the pobj on the hdd.

I had no spare SSD to add an SSD to the list. :(

5. Conclusion §

Using mfs for at least ccache or pobj but not necessarily both is beneficial. I would recommend using ccache in mfs because the memory required to store it is only 1 or 2 GB for regular builds while storing the pobj in mfs could requires a few dozen gigabytes of memory (I think chromium requires 30 or 40 GB last time I tried).