Archive for December, 2011

Preventing GCC from trashing the system

Saturday, December 31st, 2011

I’ve recently seen GCC processes consuming as much as 1GB RAM for it’s resident set size (ie, what it actually consumes in memory). I also have an i7 processor, which means I’d like to run compiles at -j8 and higher (to compensate slightly for disk IO). I have 4GB of RAM. Now, at 8 processes, each consuming 512MB of RSS, I’m starting to push into swap quite considerably, resulting in much slower actual compiles, and I can just as well be using -j2 wasting a LOT of resources by it just sitting there and not getting utilized. A plan had to be made. (more…)