[cfe-dev] ld taking too much memory to link clang

[Karen Shaeffer]

On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 02:39:20PM +0000, Renato Golin Linaro wrote:
> Gold in my case is still not helping, since I leave many programs open at
> once and swap gets crazy in the last linking steps of the debug binaries...
> 
> Funny, though, that it starts swapping before it actually hits the maximum
> memory, and I think that's why Linux is not killing the process just yet,
> but it is flogging the usability of the desktop.
> 
> --renato

Hi,
The kernel reserves a chunk of memory for itself as working space to dig out
of an out-of-memory situation. So it will swap before running out of memory,
especially if there is a large spike in memory usage at that point where
out-of-memory is approached.

This out-of-memory killer has a long history of perplexing folks, because it
isn't easy to do the right thing in all cases. The kernel might be killing the
wrong processes? Something to verify one way or the other.

enjoy,
Karen
-- 
Karen Shaeffer
Neuralscape, Mountain View, CA 94040