Re: Problem building GHC

On Wed, 2005-07-13 at 10:18 +0300, Dinko Tenev wrote:

On 7/13/05, John Skaller wrote:

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I think you need more RAM. I had to buy a new computer to fix this problem.

Oh my, that hurts...quite an expensive piece of software, GHC ;) But this really explains a lot, because two identical builds of mine happened to die on different files - it never occurred to me GCC could run low on memory though...

Try running 'top' in one window whilst compiling ..:)

How about more swap, provided I would let it run overnight?

On my box, running RH9, I had a heap of swap .. that was part of the problem -- the thing went into a paging frenzy. I think that version of Linux had very bad code in it too: I had the same problem opening too many browser windows. If you do 'random access' on virtual memory, your box will be sure to die -- you're loading a whole page when all you may want is one word :) If you run in single user mode .. you might do better to turn the swap OFF :)

...

Gcc is a badly written piece of software. What do you expect from a compiler that tries to do sophisticated optimisations .. written in C??

Ah, this sounds a bit more encouraging (really :) Wouldn't disabling GCC optimisations be an easier way then?

I cannot say for GHC -- my compiler Felix relies on the C++ compiler to do some of the work. Using GHC with a native code compiler might avoid the problem (but I'm no expert on GHC ;) -- John Skaller <skaller at users dot sourceforge dot net> Download Felix: http://felix.sf.net