portmaster, portupgrade, etc

[Eugene Grosbein]

> Why compile ports directly on a box that is so hardware constrained that it
> will take multiple hours to do, when a "pkg update; pkg upgrade" takes only
> a few minutes?

I tried really hard to run small virtual machine (1GB RAM, 25G disk) hosted at Hetzner
without using ports and can say it's impossible. Pre-built packages from official repo
are just too heavy and bloat the system with unneeded run-time dependencies
not to mention impossibility to apply hot-fix in form of a patch.
And running own repository is just not an option for such system.

portupgrade (or analog) plus ZFS compressed svn-updates ports tree is lightest option in practice:

zfs_load="YES"
vfs.zfs.arc_max="40M"
vfs.zfs.vdev.cache.size="8M"
vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable="1"
vfs.zfs.vdev.trim_on_init="0"
vfs.zfs.compressed_arc_enabled="1"

You can even run UFS-based system with /usr/ports mounted occasionally
and zfs.ko/opensolaris.ko unloaded when not needed to free memory.