[Rpm-maint] MT compression in rpmbuild ?

[Håkan Olsson]

Hello,

I’m looking for various ways forward in speeding up RPM build times.  In our various build pipelines (Continuous Integration, …) a common resource usage scenario is nice parallel compilations (-j10 or up, etc), after which the build spends several minutes in rpmbuild, with just one core running at 100%. Developers are in various ways skipping the RPM generation step in many cases due to this, not really what we want.

The little investigation I’ve done points to not very many (or any?) compression libraries themselves capable of multi-threading, what’s available seems to be mostly/only applications such as pxz, pbzip2, pigz using the standard libraries.  With rpmbuild using a library rather than e.g. streaming output to a child process replacing this appears to require a coding effort.

I have a support case with RedHat open into investigating ways forward and one of the suggestions was to ask here.  Possibly this has been discussed before?

(e.g. “deltarpm” has been mentioned as an issue, but at least in my case this is not a concern - we won’t be using it.)

Thanks, 
  Håkan

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Håkan Olsson
System Architect
Crew & Fleet Technology Development
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Jeppesen
A Boeing Company