how to speed up mock?

[Ville Skyttä]

On Monday 18 January 2010, Seth Vidal wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Jan 2010, Farkas Levente wrote:
> > the real bottleneck is not the rpmbuild itself (with ccache it cab be
> > very fast), but the mock surroundings. suppose there is build which
> > takes about 2 minutes and in mock it takes about 5 minutes:-(
> > most of the time is in yum, python tar, gzip etc which all use only one
> > cpu/core and it's very slow!
> 
> the tar  and gzip are mostly  BUILDING the cache.

I've been using lzop as the root cache compressor, it makes a difference over 
gzip here, especially when compressing the cache, but somewhat also when 
decompressing it.  Add this to /etc/mock/site-defaults.cfg to try it out:

config_opts['plugin_conf']['root_cache_opts']['compress_program'] = 'lzop'
config_opts['plugin_conf']['root_cache_opts']['extension'] = '.lzo'

For boxes with multiple cores, pigz (and maybe even pbzip2) might be worth 
looking into.  I haven't tried these myself.

Another thing I've been doing is to increase the max age for various root 
caches, for example to 60 for all EPEL roots, and 30 for released Fedora 
versions, i.e. something like this in the respective distro config in 
/etc/mock/*.cfg:

config_opts['plugin_conf']['root_cache_opts']['max_age_days'] = 60