# Can compiling code shorten hardware life?

## LinusTorvalds1

Compiling code raises CPU temps for prolonged period and seems like a strain on the machine.  Can compiling code for a few hours a week shorten hardware life compared to just using binaries?

----------

## 389292

For few hours definitely no. If you would compile 24/7, and your temps are above 90C, and you have very aggressive overclock, then maybe, at some point same overclock will be unstable. But for realistic temperatures below 75C the CPU will last for decades, regardless of utilization. I would assume that after ~30 years the mobo itself will behave funky or die because your solid caps will degrade far enough to cause problems. Also the caps in PSU can die sooner, high capacity caps are usually electrolytic.

----------

## Ionen

I do feel like keeping intel turbo boost disabled is being very kind on my intel cpu. All threads compilation without turbo = like ~55-65C, not even in the 75+ and with very quiet fan.

With Intel turbo boost? From 50C to 90+C in like a second before the fan realize something's up and finally audibly speed up  :Neutral:  Repeat this jump every time there's down times during configure phases and the like. And I can't control the fans due to no drivers for this hardware. Not that I have a problem keeping boost off (only turn it on when need better single thread perf), so I'm fine with that.

----------

## steve_v

Egads, what's up with your cooling solutions people? I've been running my old 4960X at 4.3GHz on all cores nearly 24/7 (folding etc.) for the last ~6 years and I've never seen it over 60c (tcase).

IOW, turbo boost=on, boost clock=4.3GHz, boost duration=infinite, core limit=none.

 *etnull wrote:*   

> for realistic temperatures below 75C the CPU will last for decades, regardless of utilization.

 

This^.

Having your CPU do work won't hurt longevity at all, that's it's purpose in life... So long as you keep your temperatures and voltages sane.

 *Ionen wrote:*   

> From 50C to 90C in like a second before the fan realize something's up and finally audibly speed up

 Then your CPU heatsink is too small with too little thermal-mass, or whoever wrote the fan control code is a muppet. Probably both if it's a laptop. Not much to be done about poor laptop cooling design besides not buying from that vendor again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

----------

## NeddySeagoon

LinusTorvalds1,

There are several factors at play. The short answer is yes but it won't matter to you.

First, its well documented that every every 10 deg C rise in junction temperature doubles the random failure rate in silicon transistors.

Provided that the silicon is operated within its rated temperature limits, you will have thrown in away before it fails.

So much for random failures.

Thermal cycling, caused by switching a system off and allowing it to cool, then on again so it warms up again imposes mechanical stress on all the parts.

Computers are made with lead free solder which is really not very good in this respect.

Its why tin lead solder is still used in medical and a few other applications. Minimising thermal cycling is good for electronics life expectancy.

There's more.  Read about gold embrittlement of solder joints, inrush currents  (that why things fail at switch on), bi-metallic corrosion ...

Just accept the short answer :)

----------

## LinusTorvalds1

Appreciate the input!

Also, the Gentoo wiki says to use N + 1 jobs, where N is the number cores.   My laptop has 4 cores, but will crash if I use -j3 or higher for a prolonged period, unless I place a room fan right next to the laptop.

I'm doing about a dozen temperature tests (1 per night) and will update the thread once I have the results.

----------

## NeddySeagoon

LinusTorvalds1,

Support your laptop on a couple of thick books. I recommend the Complete works of O'Henry and the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (A trilogy in four parts) so that air can circulate underneath.

The books are a good read too. :)

If your laptop is a few years old, the cooling system may be full of grot. Do not be tempted to clean it with a hoover. That will destroy the fans.

Also the thermal paste may have migrated away from where its needed.

If you are confident that you can dismember it and put it back together, give it a clean with a natural bristle brush and replace the thermal paste.

If its a new laptoop, the cooling system is inadequate by design and it will get worse as it ages.

----------

## dmpogo

Any use  shortens the life of hardware    :Very Happy: 

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## LinusTorvalds1

Haha, I actually started using a laptop stand.  To be specific, this one:

Vantec Lapcool TX Ultra

https://www.amazon.com/Vantec-LapCool-LPC-460TX-Adjustable-Notebook/dp/B001DHHWPK

edit: After searching Amazon, there appears to be much better ones (more fans) in the $30-$40 range. Search for "laptop cooler", as opposed to "laptop stand".

Better than nothing, but the room fan appears to be most effective cooling tool.  I will post test results in 1-2 weeks.

The laptop is approaching 8 years.  It's a Lenovo IdeaPad, i7-3610QM CPU @ 2.30GHz (4 cores / 8 threads). I'm not comfortable taking it part, but good to know for when if/when I get a desktop.

----------

## LinusTorvalds1

...btw, the laptop stand I shared is very old as well.  After searching Amazon, there appears to be much better ones (more fans) in the $30-$40 range.  Search for "laptop cooler", as opposed to "laptop stand".

----------

## LinusTorvalds1

Temperature test finally complete:

https://imgur.com/AZ0RrDE

The results how how significant of an impact the room fan and raising the stand make... and it's quite significant. The stand's fan made no difference.  There was also little difference going from -j2 to -j3, other than some -j3 runs producing a lot of heat and forcing the computer to shutoff.

About the test:

I compiled firefox-68.09esr using 

```
cpu_flags_x86_avx2 lto pgo pulseaudio
```

The CPU throttles numbers don't make sense.  I expect more throttling with -j4.  I count throttles as:

```
dmesg | grep -i  throttled | cut -d ' ' -f 2 | sed 's/\..*//g' | uniq | wc -l
```

Computer:

2012 Lenovo Ideapad

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3610QM CPU @ 2.30GHz (4 cores, 8 threads)

8G RAM

Stand:

Vantec Lapcool TX Ultra (there are better ones in the similar price range!)

----------

## Tony0945

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> If your laptop is a few years old, the cooling system may be full of grot. Do not be tempted to clean it with a hoover. That will destroy the fans.

 

Standard advice is to use canned air. Even with that, use a pencil or wooden dowel to block the fan blades when spraying. A metal object is conductive. A plastic object is capacitative. Use a wooden pencil or a wooden dowel.

----------

## Tony0945

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> Thermal cycling, caused by switching a system off and allowing it to cool, then on again so it warms up again imposes mechanical stress on all the parts.
> 
> Computers are made with lead free solder which is really not very good in this respect.

 

I've been unhappy with the frequency jitter using the ondemand governor while emerging. 

Now I have a thermal cycling issue to worry about as well. I was thinking purely about performance before.

I've thought about a simple app to switch to "performance" via the /sys interface,  run emerge, than switch to "conservative".

What do you think?

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## dmpogo

 *Tony0945 wrote:*   

>  *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   If your laptop is a few years old, the cooling system may be full of grot. Do not be tempted to clean it with a hoover. That will destroy the fans. 
> 
> Standard advice is to use canned air. Even with that, use a pencil or wooden dowel to block the fan blades when spraying. A metal object is conductive. A plastic object is capacitative. Use a wooden pencil or a wooden dowel.

 

You are all probably right,  but I don't get any obvious feel why.   Why blowing air is fundamentally different from sucking it in ?   Why is it better for the fan to fix the blades rather than allow them to freely rotate ( which, one would think, the fan is designed for) ?

----------

## figueroa

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> If your laptop is a few years old, the cooling system may be full of grot. Do not be tempted to clean it with a hoover. That will destroy the fans.

 

I'm not personally sure of the conventional wisdom based on my experience. I've used shop vac exhaust to clean out hundreds of desktop computers over 20 years, with especially though use on fans which spin like crazy with whirring sound (both directions), with no fan trouble at all. I've done it on laptops too, but a lot fewer. Laptop is much more difficult without disassembly due to poor ventilation design. You don't want to blow dirt and lint in deeper and have it get stuck. I've never damaged a fan, but some high speed spinning has made a couple of fans run more quietly afterwards. But, if you don't want the fan to spin, just put a finger on the hub.

In some cases (laptops too) the insides were so dirty the accumulated lint had to be picked out with fingers before blowing it out. And, in the case of greasy dirt like from industrial areas, you just have to get into it with small tools and Q-Tips (cotton swabs) and even toothpicks. Of course your mileage may vary. Do be thoughtful of static build up.

A cleaner PC will definitely run cooler, and maybe more quietly.

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## figueroa

 *Tony0945 wrote:*   

>  *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   If your laptop is a few years old, the cooling system may be full of grot. Do not be tempted to clean it with a hoover. That will destroy the fans. 
> 
> Standard advice is to use canned air. Even with that, use a pencil or wooden dowel to block the fan blades when spraying. A metal object is conductive. A plastic object is capacitative. Use a wooden pencil or a wooden dowel.

 

If you use very much canned air, it starts to get cold causing condensation. I get less condensation with compressed air from a compressor. In practice, I use a shop vac as a blower, which causes no condensation.

----------

## Juippisi

For the past 17 years I've used Gentoo I've _never_ had to replace a motherboard/CPU because it broke down, only because they became outdated and slow. I had i7-2600k for 7+ years, compiling chromium all the time.

But yeah, I've only once done overclocking, wasn't my thing...

----------

## dmpogo

 *Juippisi wrote:*   

> For the past 17 years I've used Gentoo I've _never_ had to replace a motherboard/CPU because it broke down, only because they became outdated and slow. I had i7-2600k for 7+ years, compiling chromium all the time.
> 
> But yeah, I've only once done overclocking, wasn't my thing...

 

In my similar number of years I had 6 desktops and 3 laptops.    3 destops (one was actually a server) died due to harddrive failure, which happened sufficiently late that replacing drives were more of a hustle than worth it.    One ( 2004 opterons on TYAN board) - got unstable, so it can be motherboard failure.  Or power supply. Except this one where I had no choice for opteron processors,  for the rest I paid attention to choose motherboards with most durable capacitors, and they never failed.

Among two running desktops ( from 2007 and 2011) the first had harddrive failure couple of years ago (after > 10 years), but being already SATA it was easy to get SSD in, and it runs happily.   From laptops,  first (Gateway circa 2001) is still running, if plugged into AC.   The second (Thinkpad circa 2008, with one of the first SSD drives) is kind of dead - fan is near dead since 2018.  if you shake it well during boot (or blow into the fan  :Smile:  )  it may start, if not - posts fan failure.  Since it was 10 years old I got a new one.

----------

## Ionen

^ as usual moving parts tend to go first (fans, mechanical hard drives). I (personally), never had anything else than those break / get noisy.. well, my own boxes anyway, game consoles didn't fare as well  :Neutral: 

Speaking of fans, I had a box working 24/7 from early 2003 to 2011 or so (tyan tiger mpx board with two athlon mp 2400+), and all 3 of its case fans, both cpu fans, and the psu's fan all went bad  :Shocked: . It did have a gpu card that I barely used but it was fan-less. Its hard drives been fine although those did go through a few replacements anyway due to size limitations. Unfortunately that box never had the chance to run gentoo but did run a linuxfromscratch install for some time and seen its share of compiling  :Smile: 

Edit:

My current weak low power server box is entirely fan-less and with ssds only, can't say I expect it to break. It is running gentoo but I compile binpkgs on another faster machine.

Oh yeah, I did have a old early'ish ssd "break" due to a firmware bug that made it stop working after 2000 hours power on time (don't ask me), firmware upgrade fixed it but took me a while to figure out what was wrong with it and nearly replaced it. Still works after over 80000 power on hours now, still good for more write cycles for years to come... albeit it is a bit small.

----------

## dmpogo

 *Ionen wrote:*   

> ^ as usual moving parts tend to go first (fans, mechanical hard drives). I (personally), never had anything else than those break / get noisy.. well, my own boxes anyway, game consoles didn't fare as well 
> 
> 

 

Power supplies on desktops do go bad sometimes. I had two replacements on that 6 desktops.

----------

## NeddySeagoon

The problem with forcing air through a fan is that it can rotate much faster that its design speed and shorten the bearing life, or if you are really lucky, cause it fail then and there so you notice it at first power up.

Moving air is usually very dry. Be it from a can or workshop compressor.

It drops moisture when its compressed and more when it cools as it expands. Rubbing dry things, even gases, is a good way to create static electricity.

Rubbing the static sensitive parts of you PC in this way should be avoided.

True, air from a hoover is not as dry, so the problem is reduced.

LinusTorvalds1,

Your unstated assumption is that bigger -jX numbers make the CPU work harder, thus get hotter. That's only true while the CPU is the limiting factor.

e.g. if -j4 drives your sysem into swapping, it will switch from being CPU limited to IO limited. Bigger -jX will then have no effect on the CPU temperature.

Firefox is a goot test. Its one of the few programs that can actually use -j100. OK, its 'only' a 96 core box but you have to try these things.

Look at your historic build times with 

```
genlop -t firefox
```

 That reports elapsed time.

When swapping starts, the build time will do a step increase.

Swapping does not mean that your swap partition is in use. The kernel can and does do swapping other ways too but that's a topic all on its own.

----------

## Tony0945

High pressure air can destroy a fan's bearings. This depends on the quality of the bearing (what do you think came "free" in your box?) the air pressure and the type of bearing. They have a design speed. Think of revving your engine to 10,000 RPM via an external electric motor.  I did once destroy a cpu cooler (OEM) by blowing air (from a can!). It tore right off the shaft. PC was down until I purchased an aftermarket fan that fit.  Coolermaster? It was on a k6 long ago.  Possibly this was caused by the air spinning it backward.  The canned air I can buy now leaves a greasy residue. Yes, I use a garage compressor throttled down to 5 psi. I wasn't going to mention that because it's not recommended and I DO NOT RECOMMEND anyone else doing it. Nor shaving by sticking one's face into a lawn mower. Best is to use magnetic filters and wash them often. This implies a positive pressure case. 

There is a large thread on blowing vs sucking, materials and methods somewhere on this forum.  

Let's not derail the original thread.

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## 389292

 *Quote:*   

> The canned air I can buy now leaves a greasy residue.

 

+ for this one.

From my own experience I also once blowed-in a small dust particle between the monitor panels (internal matrices), I couldn't then get to it even after dissembling the panel (the particle went literally between light panel and the liquid crystals array). Never use any kind of pressured air on the edges of your monitor. And the aforementioned issue with greasy/oily residue can be a huge NO NO to use on unpopulated RAM slots. Canned air can be dangerous for electronics.

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## dmpogo

 *etnull wrote:*   

>  *Quote:*   The canned air I can buy now leaves a greasy residue. 
> 
> + for this one.
> 
> From my own experience I also once blowed-in a small dust particle between the monitor panels (internal matrices), I couldn't then get to it even after dissembling the panel (the particle went literally between light panel and the liquid crystals array). Never use any kind of pressured air on the edges of your monitor. And the aforementioned issue with greasy/oily residue can be a huge NO NO to use on unpopulated RAM slots. Canned air can be dangerous for electronics.

 

That's interesting.  Is the one sold in automotive stores to clean carburators also have this issue ? I would have thought that will be a problem ...

----------

## eccerr0r

carburetor cleaner isn't just compressed gas, it contains harsh solvents that eats many plastics, so be careful with it.

----------

## 389292

 *dmpogo wrote:*   

> That's interesting.  Is the one sold in automotive stores to clean carburators also have this issue ? I would have thought that will be a problem ...

 

If I recall correctly it was canned air tailored for PC cleaning, bought in electronics store, although it was very cheap one, about 4$ or so, maybe if you buy expensive German canned air for 20$ it won't have this problem. The usual test I do is to spray for ~5 seconds on a clean glass surface and then look under bright light.

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## eccerr0r

"Canned air" is usually freon, last can I bought was mostly R134.  It shouldn't have oil in it if it's used for dusting but one never knows...  If you bought the one for charging air conditioners, then it may have oil.

Carburetor cleaner tends to be a mixture.  I've run across two kinds recently, one that's acetone based (works marginally) and one with dichloromethane (works well, but poor for environment due to VOC.)  Both eat many types of plastics.  I'd imagine carburetor cleaner contain some sort of oil as an lubricant for carburetor parts so definitely don't use this for cleaning dust, you'd have liquid everywhere anyway.

Brake cleaner I've only run across one type so far that contains basically gasoline or more correctly, lightweight petroleum distillates.  I heard that there are some that has dichloromethane as well, likewise with carburetor cleaner - banned in some areas due to VOC.  Both of these were meant to somewhat have a liquid residue that you can wipe off with a rag, so might not be good for electronics.  And both may eat certain types of plastics like polystyrene.

----------

## steve_v

 *eccerr0r wrote:*   

> "Canned air" is usually freon, last can I bought was mostly R134.

 

Technically, the "freon" brand name only covers R-12, R-13, R-22, R-410, R-502, and R-503. R134 is Tetrafluoroethane IIRC.  :Razz: 

 *eccerr0r wrote:*   

> 
> 
> Brake cleaner I've only run across one type so far that contains basically gasoline or more correctly, lightweight petroleum distillates.  I heard that there are some that has dichloromethane as well, likewise with carburetor cleaner - banned in some areas due to VOC.

 

The higher percentage trichloroethylene/tetrachloroethylene and/or dichloromethane the better it works  :Wink:  The rest is usually acetone and heptane or other light petroleum distillate.

Where you say "Brake cleaner", I say "General purpose degreaser".

I sure wouldn't use any kind of industrial or automotive degreaser anywhere near a modern computer though, you're far too likely to destroy some important bit of plastic. Plastic-safe electrical contact cleaner would be a better bet if you must.

That said, I find 99% of the time all that is needed is a soft antistatic brush. Cooling problems in PCs are almost always dry dust and/or hair, and you don't need solvents for that.

Anyway, I expect all this talk of compressed air and solvents has a lot to do to do with people too lazy to disassemble things for cleaning...

----------

## Tony0945

 *steve_v wrote:*   

> Anyway, I expect all this talk of compressed air and solvents has a lot to do to do with people too lazy to disassemble things for cleaning...

 

A tremendous amount of dust will accumulate in the fins of your CPU cooler. You don't have to be lazy to not want to remove the cooler and restore CPU sealer every six months.

----------

## steve_v

 *Tony0945 wrote:*   

> You don't have to be lazy to not want to remove the cooler and restore CPU sealer every six months.

 

All that's usually required to get at the heatsink fins is removal of the fan, something that tends to be rather easy (and often tool-less) on any reasonable quality cooler.

As for thermal compound (assumed meaning of "sealer"), that's something that should be replaced anyway. Not every six months of course, but then unless you're in a particularly dusty environment I doubt you'd need to clean anything that frequently to begin with.

----------

## Fitzcarraldo

 *steve_v wrote:*   

>  *Tony0945 wrote:*   You don't have to be lazy to not want to remove the cooler and restore CPU sealer every six months. 
> 
> All that's usually required to get at the heatsink fins is removal of the fan, something that tends to be rather easy (and often tool-less) on any reasonable quality cooler.

 

In many laptops it's not easy. In my two OEM laptops (Compal and Clevo) it's very easy, but in cheaper laptops it can be tricky to get at the fan. Some years ago I bought an Acer Aspire 5536-643G25Mn laptop that had a tendency to overheat, and it needed to be almost completely disassembled in order to get at the fan, including removal of the keyboard from the top of the laptop.

----------

## Tony0945

 *steve_v wrote:*   

> All that's usually required to get at the heatsink fins is removal of the fan, something that tends to be rather easy (and often tool-less) on any reasonable quality cooler.
> 
> As for thermal compound (assumed meaning of "sealer"), that's something that should be replaced anyway. Not every six months of course, but then unless you're in a particularly dusty environment I doubt you'd need to clean anything that frequently to begin with.

 

Four tiny screws that can easily get lost.  

Yes, "thermal compound". Brain was not functioning due to extreme heat/humidity conditions.

I've never removed thermal compound except when changing CPU's. Then I use Arctic silver but I'm told that's passe and I should use the new stuff that looks like colored glue.

MUCH easier to stick a pencil between the fan blades and wave the nozzle of your favorite blower or vacuum over the fins.

Re dusty environment/ Yes I have one. House is 30 years old, probably needs duct cleaning. My wife needs to vacuum the carpets weekly.Last edited by Tony0945 on Sat Jul 25, 2020 4:07 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## dmpogo

 *steve_v wrote:*   

> 
> 
> As for thermal compound (assumed meaning of "sealer"), that's something that should be replaced anyway. Not every six months of course, but then unless you're in a particularly dusty environment I doubt you'd need to clean anything that frequently to begin with.

 

Wow,  I never even contemplated replacing thermal compound over 25 years of owning computers  :Smile:     And they all lasted until venerable age of a decade or so.   Do you really reseat you CPU's heatsink often ?Last edited by dmpogo on Sat Jul 25, 2020 4:20 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## eccerr0r

Only thing that should be done is if you remove the heatsink from the CPU you should use new thermal compound -- one of the reasons why I don't remove it frequently...

As an experiment (okay, laziness) I removed the heatsink/fan for cleaning on a computer and put it back without redoing the thermal paste (original gray stuff that came with the heatsink).  It sort of worked fine, the heatsink was stlil cooling fine.  Eventually after a few swaps, during compiling the CPU got quite warm, hitting thermal limit frequently.  So I finally did due diligence, cleaned off the older gray heatsink compound and reapplied heatsink compound.  This time I only have the cheap white zinc oxide compound.

Well, not sudden drop in temperatures but it no longer hit thermal limit anymore while compiling, stayed below the limit.  Probably a good 10°C drop from before.

I'm not sure what the gray compound was, but not reapplying fresh compound was not a good idea, even if the gray stuff was silver based.  But I'll probably just continue to use my air compressor to blow out the dust with the whole computer so I don't need to reapply paste each time...

----------

## dmpogo

 *eccerr0r wrote:*   

> Only thing that should be done is if you remove the heatsink from the CPU you should use new thermal compound -- one of the reasons why I don't remove it frequently...
> 
> 

 

If you remove heatsinks - sure,  makes sense.     In the post I was replying to it sounded that the author does it on a yearly basis.

----------

## NeddySeagoon

dmpogo,

Once upon a time, a long time ago, in the age of SETI@home classic, I ran a P3 laptop.

I went to boot it and before it got the the command prompt, it shut down.

Removing the bottom cover showed that lots of heatsink compound was no longer between the CPU/GPU and heatsink, where it was supposed to be.

Removing the heatsink, cleaning up the mess and applying new heatsink compound made it as good as new.

----------

## eccerr0r

That sounds like too much heatsink compound was applied if it oozed out from between. 

Unfortunately this is extremely common in mass produced computers :(

BTW I have killed one cpu by overheating.  It was an overclocked, overvolted CPU that was stable initially but as time went on, became unstable and eventually stopped being reliable enough to use.  Oh well, was fun while it lasted, a 50% overclock and SMP (in the days when SMP wasn't much of a thing).

----------

## dmpogo

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> dmpogo,
> 
> Once upon a time, a long time ago, in the age of SETI@home classic, I ran a P3 laptop.
> 
> I went to boot it and before it got the the command prompt, it shut down.
> ...

 

And that was with a factory installation ?  Sad ...

----------

## steve_v

 *Tony0945 wrote:*   

> I use Arctic silver but I'm told that's passe and I should use the new stuff that looks like colored glue.

 

Really, I wouldn't stress over fancy heatsink compound. The improvement it offers is miniscule at best.

 *Tony0945 wrote:*   

> MUCH easier to stick a pencil between the fan blades and wave the nozzle of your favorite blower or vacuum over the fins.

 

Indeed. My comment re a brush is for when you don't have a vacuum handy, but either way there's no need for compressed air or solvents.

 *dmpogo wrote:*   

> I never even contemplated replacing thermal compound over 25 years of owning computers     And they all lasted until venerable age of a decade or so.   Do you really reseat you CPU's heatsink often?

 

Not often, only when I've got the thing apart for other reasons, or there's a cooling problem to solve. That works out to once every 2-5 years on average.

I've still got machines that are going on 25 BTW  :Razz: 

Thermal compound dries out over time, and with heavy coolers and machines that are moved, that means it eventually escapes. I've seen quite a few cases of this over the years, especially when a cooler has just been cleaned in-place, and therefore disturbed.

If your cooling performance doesn't improve after cleaning the dust out of the heatsink fins, this'll be why... Well, that or you used compressed air and buggered the fan bearings.  :Wink: 

 *eccerr0r wrote:*   

> This time I only have the cheap white zinc oxide compound.

 

Cheap thermal compound is fine, unless you're going for crazy overclocks. It's miles better than the pads or pre-applied crap that OEMs tend to use, and a 10ml tube will last you forever.

I've been using Electrolube HTC for everything from big-ass power transistors to GPU coolers for decades, with no issues whatsoever. If it's good enough for a 1.5KW power amplifier, it's good enough for a 90W CPU.

 *eccerr0r wrote:*   

> BTW I have killed one cpu by overheating.

 

I've never killed one, but the entire HSF assembly did fall off my DX4-120 that one time... And absolutely nothing happened.  :Very Happy: 

----------

## NeddySeagoon

When two flat plates touch, like the heat spreader of a CPU and a heatsink, they touch at exactly three points, like a tripod.

That leaves a layer of air in between.

Almost anything has a lower thermal resistance than air, What matters most is getting all the air out.

Heatsink compound, is much better than air and much worse than metals as a thermal conductor.

Its important that enough thermal compound is applied to displace the air and no more.

Excess thermal compound is as bad as no thermal compound.

If it looks like the jam in a piece, that's wrong :)

----------

## Tony0945

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> If it looks like the jam in a piece, that's wrong 

  Ah! Scottish slang!  Here in Chicago, a "piece" is a handgun.  A jam in a piece is a stuck slide in an automatic handgun. Quite different!

Thanks for the link. Always good to keep learning things.

----------

## Fitzcarraldo

My Compal laptop is 10 years old and I have never touched /var/log/emerge.log since installation in March 2010. I have just ran 'qlop -c -H' on it out of curiosity:

```
total: 492 days, 5 hours, 47 minutes, 44 seconds for 67841 merges, 4295 unmerges, 446 syncs
```

 :Shocked: 

That's roughly 13% of its 124 months 'life' spent compiling.

----------

## eccerr0r

 :Shocked:  <- that is right...

How'd you get that high... My oldest box has history from 2009 (though it was installed earlier than that) and its qlop -c -H is only 30.5 days.  It had help from distcc and in its earlier days on physical hardware on a (then) relatively fast box.

My only guess is that suspend/resume works fine and you suspended it during builds or emerge -e @world frequently? one of the two?  or both?

----------

## figueroa

Very interesting.  My oldest installation, which has gone through several hardware upgrades:

```
$ head -1 /var/log/emerge.log

1098916659: Started emerge on: Oct 27, 2004 22:37:39
```

It's currently an AMD Phenom(tm) 8650 Triple-Core Processor with 8 G RAM on a Gigabyte MA78GM-US2H bought 5/2/2009 (11+ years ago), no longer my primary desktop machine but works hard a a home file/mail/web server.

```
$ qlop -c -H

sync: 4 minutes, 38 seconds average for 4085 syncs

total: 65 days, 23 hours, 28 minutes, 11 seconds for 30982 merges, 5446 unmerges, 4085 syncs
```

I didn't even know about this command till I read this thread.

----------

## eccerr0r

Had to check a slow machine (my nonupgradeable Atom N270) -

History starts from 2009 as well, and it had 57.7 days worth of compiling 11000 merges and 700 unmerges.  This machine also had distcc help.

So I still have to assume Fitzcarraldo must be emerge -e @world frequently or something else is going on...  :Shocked: 

I still need to check my second oldest install from late 2004, this machine likewise has not gotten any significant hardware upgrades/downgrades so it might have different results - though it's fallen into disuse due to its size/weight/speed ratios...  The "2009" machine I posted earlier (that I installed in 2004 just prior to joining fgo) has had multiple hardware upgrades and then a "downgrade" as it got moved onto a virtual machine, albeit the physical machine it's running on is newer than the hardware it replaced, nevertheless the install has been continually been used almost 24/7/365 since 2004.

----------

## Fitzcarraldo

 *eccerr0r wrote:*   

> So I still have to assume Fitzcarraldo must be emerge -e @world frequently or something else is going on... 

 

Only a few times, so I don't think that is a major factor. It is an Intel Core i7 720QM (1.6 GHz but throttled to 933 MHz by Compal due to Compal's PSU size, although I bought a higher Wattage PSU recently and it seems to run at 1.6 GHz now). It has always had KDE installed on it, and upgrades to KDE have kept it busy. LibreOffice, qtwebengine, Firefox etc. have also been long to compile. These days, even with jumbo-build, qtwebengine takes more than a day to build. I did have trouble with the HDD getting nearly full over a period of time (/usr/tmp/portage/ contained a whopping 30GB of directories and files until I cleared it out), which also caused swapping and slowed things down.

----------

## eccerr0r

I'm shocked because my Atom single core 1.6GHz is much slower than a Core i7-720QM 1.6GHz, even if downclocked to 933MHz all of the time - the architectural benefits and available cores should speed things along assuming the workload is similar between atom and nehalem.

My i7 took about 3.5 hours the last time to build qtwebengine, so I suspect yours should be on the order of 4x as long at 933MHz, so 14 hours or so for you.   I do have to suspect my 3.5 hours may have been partially attributed to distcc, but the i7 is my fastest machine and distcc hasn't really improved throughput for my i7 significantly at least from what it "feels" like when my slower machines are helpers.

I never did an -e @world on the Atom specifically due to the speed issue.  The Atom has a XFCE4 install with firefox with rust and all, so it should be spending quite a bit of time building binaries...

And aha, I don't build libreoffice, I just use libreoffice-bin.  That probably would be a huge contribution to the discrepancy.

----------

## figueroa

I ditched distcc several years ago and anecdotally may have experienced a small speed up. Who could know. Sure saved a lot of hard drive space. Definitely didn't seem to be doing any good.

I'm doing an emerge -e @world right now on my Gateway ec1803 notebook with a single core Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Solo CPU U3500 @ 1.40GHz. Started yesterday and tonight it has over 700 of about 1,005 packages to go. I'm not at the keyboard, but accessed it by ssh from my office (it's running in the dining room). It's got 4 G of RAM installed, and plenty of hard drive space, but still slow slow slow.

The reason for the huge rebuild was to change the chost from i586 to i686. I have been afraid of being left behind as this is the last of my i586 builds. But, now I'm sorry I started this project. It's summer and raising the temperature in the house. I have a small fan blowing on it which lowered the CPU temp by about 5 degrees C.

----------

## Fitzcarraldo

 *eccerr0r wrote:*   

> And aha, I don't build libreoffice, I just use libreoffice-bin. That probably would be a huge contribution to the discrepancy.

 

Unfortunately that laptop has ~amd64 (Testing) installed rather than amd64 (Stable), so it's not possible to install the binary package of LibreOffice due to dependency conflicts. As all the big packages take so long to compile on this particular laptop, I ended up installing firefox-bin rather than firefox, and only Microsoft Office 2007 running under WINE rather than that plus LibreOffice, although I'm still stuck with having to compile qtwebengine. On my newer Clevo W230SS laptop, which is amd64 with only a few ~amd64 packages, I do compile firefox and libreoffice (but still install Microsoft Office 2007 under WINE) because the compilation times are less of a showstopper on the newer machine.

----------

## eccerr0r

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=~amd64 would indeed cause a lot of merges. 

Yeah I run stable, that's probably why I don't see too much version thrashing.  But still, that's a lot of build time...

----------

## depontius

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> LinusTorvalds1,
> 
> There are several factors at play. The short answer is yes but it won't matter to you.
> 
> First, its well documented that every every 10 deg C rise in junction temperature doubles the random failure rate in silicon transistors.
> ...

 

Since you talked about solder failure, don't forget about "tin whiskers" from lead-free solder.  From what I understand, a purely chemical phenomenon, you don't have to thermal cycle, run or even power up your computer.  The "tin whiskers" grow while it's just sitting there.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_%28metallurgy%29

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## NeddySeagoon

depontius,

My whiskers grow like that too :)

----------

## depontius

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> depontius,
> 
> My whiskers grow like that too 

 

I suspect yours are as grey as mine.

----------

## LinusTorvalds1

 *LinusTorvalds1 wrote:*   

> Temperature test finally complete:
> 
> https://imgur.com/AZ0RrDE
> 
> The results how how significant of an impact the room fan and raising the stand make... and it's quite significant. The stand's fan made no difference.  There was also little difference going from -j2 to -j3, other than some -j3 runs producing a lot of heat and forcing the computer to shutoff.
> ...

 

I bought a new laptop cooler a couple of weeks ago: KLIM Wind (4 fans) for $25 from Amazon (now $30).  It has a lot of good reviews and I wanted 4 large fans as opposed to 6 small-medium sized ones.

Here are the tests:

https://i.imgur.com/kF2Ilw1.png

As expected, the fans and upright stand helped.  But while this test isn't perfectly comparable to the last one (test performed in a different environment, Firefox 68.09 vs 68.11 and removed cpu_flags_x86_avx2), the room fan in the previous test was still significantly than whatever the KLIM could produce.  So if you have a spare fan lying around, I would use that   :Very Happy: 

----------

## Fitzcarraldo

 *Fitzcarraldo wrote:*   

> My Compal laptop is 10 years old and I have never touched /var/log/emerge.log since installation in March 2010. I have just ran 'qlop -c -H' on it out of curiosity:
> 
> ```
> total: 492 days, 5 hours, 47 minutes, 44 seconds for 67841 merges, 4295 unmerges, 446 syncs
> ```
> ...

 

My Clevo laptop (Intel Core i7-4810MQ CPU @ 2.80GHz) running Gentoo amd64 (with a few ~amd64 packages) is 5 years old and I have never touched /var/log/emerge.log since installation in April 2015. I have just run 'qlop -c -H' on it to see how it compared to the  10-years-old Compal laptop (Intel Core i7 CPU Q 720 @ 1.60GHz throttled to 933 MHz by Compal) running Gentoo ~amd64, mentioned in my previous post quoted above:

```
total: 53 days, 11 hours, 3 minutes, 31 seconds for 24494 merges, 1717 unmerges, 169 syncs
```

That's roughly 3% of its 64 months 'life' spent compiling. Nowhere near as bad as the old Compal laptop, but still a lot of time spent compiling. The latest merge time for qtwebengine (5.14.2) was 4 hours 25 minutes.

----------

## Tony0945

```
~ $ qlop -c -H

sys-libs/ldb: 1 minute, 47 seconds average for 1 merge

app-text/gnome-doc-utils: 3 seconds average for 1 unmerge

dev-libs/gdl: 3 seconds average for 1 unmerge

dev-libs/libgee: 3 seconds average for 1 unmerge

gnome-base/gnome-common: 2 seconds average for 1 unmerge

sync: 0 seconds average for 2 syncs

total: 1 minute, 58 seconds for 1 merge, 4 unmerges, 2 syncs
```

Something seems to be autocleaning the logs.

----------

## eccerr0r

Perhaps logrotating your emerge log?

----------

## Tony0945

 *eccerr0r wrote:*   

> Perhaps logrotating your emerge log?

 

Thanks! That's exactly what happened:

```
SI /var/log # ls emerge.log* -l

-rw-rw-r-- 1 portage portage 7792 Aug 16 11:01 emerge.log

-rw-rw-r-- 1 portage portage 1844 Aug 10 15:08 emerge.log-20200811.gz

-rw-rw-r-- 1 portage portage  397 Aug 11 10:26 emerge.log-20200812.gz

-rw-rw-r-- 1 portage portage 1300 Aug 14 11:24 emerge.log-20200815.gz

-rw-rw-r-- 1 portage portage 1789 Aug 15 21:25 emerge.log-20200816.gz

```

I guess none of them are worth restoring. I commented out monthly rotate of emerge.log. Don't know why I did that. Probably didn't think.

Also, I note that although it's supposed to rotate monthly, it seems to be rotating every sync, which may be why the sync's are long.

----------

## figueroa

 *Tony0945 wrote:*   

> qlop -c -H

 

glop ??

----------

## alamahant

Hi,

Some measures to lighten the whole situation.

1.Disable intel turbo boost

```

/bin/echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo

```

2.Use half the available Jobs.

3.Use /var/tmp/portage on tmpfs.

4.avoid long compiles like eg chromium etc and use binaries when available.

Worst offenders

chromium is the worst of the worst.it will also prepare breakfast for you in the morning.Use google-chrome instead.

libreoffice.Use flatpak

webkit-gtk.Avoid it by USE

qtwebengine.Avoid it by USE.Do not use KDE.

rust.Use rust-bin

firefox.Use firefox-bin

 :Very Happy: 

----------

## Tony0945

 *figueroa wrote:*   

>  *Tony0945 wrote:*   qlop -c -H 
> 
> glop ??

 

That's a "q" not a "g".

```
 ~ $ equery b qlop

 * Searching for qlop ... 

app-portage/portage-utils-0.87 (/usr/bin/qlop -> q)
```

----------

