On Sat, 2009-11-28 at 19:39 +0200, Michael Snoyman wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm trying out NearlyFreeSpeech.net for hosting my Haskell apps. They
> use FreeBSD 7.2, but I can't get cabal-install to compile since it
> runs out of memory during the link phase. So far I haven't had trouble
> manually installing packages, but it would be nice to just do cabal
> install...

I expect you'll find the same thing happens if you link anything else.
My suggestion is to rebuild ghc from source and disable the "split
objects" feature. That feature reduces final binary sizes but it makes
the linker work too hard (and use too much memory).

On Gentoo we used to disable "split objects" on machines with less than
256Mb memory. And that was with GNU ld which has had some memory use
improvements in recent years.

Duncan