[llvm-dev] System hangs during last stages of LLVM build | Tips on speeding it up ?

[serge guelton via llvm-dev]

On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 09:45:07AM -0800, Tim Northover via llvm-dev wrote:
> Hi Sanjay,
> 
> On 23 February 2017 at 09:21, SANJAY SRIVALLABH SINGAPURAM via
> llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> > My system hangs every time during last stages of building LLVM ( starting at
> > 95% in a CMake build ) using CMake or Ninja, sometime close to the linking
> > of llvm-dysmutil. Could you please suggest tips that could speed up the
> > compilation ?
> 
> This is probably because multiple linker processes are using all your
> memory and bogging down in swap. There are various things you can do
> to improve performance:
> 
>   * There's an LLVM_PARALLEL_LINK_JOBS option which you can use to
> reduce the number of ld instances running at once (you'll need to be
> using Ninja rather than Make for this to work, but that's faster
> anyway). This is a slightly more fine-grained approach than Tobias's
> "-j 1"; systems can usually support more compile jobs than link.
>  * If on Linux, you can switch to ld.gold (or lld if you're feeling
> brave!), which is much faster than the default ld.bfd
>  * Also on ELF platforms, there's LLVM_USE_SPLIT_DWARF which separates
> the debug info into a different file. This really speeds things up,
> but you need a recent(ish) gdb to be able to debug the result.
> 
> Those are the obvious ways to reduce memory. You might also consider
> only building the targets you need, which will speed things up but not
> get around swapping usually.

And if you can afford it, passing -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON to cmake makes
the last step blazing fast.