Re: [gentoo-amd64] Is swap need when there is 4g of ram?

[Bernhard Auzinger <e0026053@student.tuwien.ac.at>]

> j2 for MAKEOPTS and +kdeenablefinal and after some time each one of the
> makejobs want 900mb ram. There are two libs where that happens, makes
> kdepim the slowest-to-compile packet for me. Wesnoth is also an offender.
> Some versions want 500mb+ at some point when compiling.

That's pretty much. About 3 years ago I watched a similar behaviour on PyQt. 
At that time I had just 512MB of ram (and a 1.2GHz pentium3) and that tiny 
package drove me crazy because the memory requested by gcc when compiling 
PyQt was more than 512MB and the compile process did not only happen on data 
stored in the ram but also on data stored in the swap space. It was awful. My 
system was not usable for more than an hour. It was so busy swapping as I 
never saw a system swapping before. I remember that after a upgrade to 1G ram 
the PyQt package took less than five minutes. I decided to trace the memory 
usage when compiling PyQt and I recognized that it was less than a minute 
requesting so much memory. That was the first time I was convinced that 
swapping can end very very bad.

rgds
Bernhard

-- 
gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list