If you are Gentoo user and you're wondering about how to reduce portage tree disk usage and makes emerge --sync faster, this article is for you. Lets talk about key problems of portage tree: Large disk usage because of uncompressed text data Heavy inode usage because of huge amount of files The above problems result in excessive disk I/O during emerge operations. The most popular solution is to squash the portage tree. It is well-described in this article . But I've made an easier script that can handle all the headache for you. I hope you like it! :)