Re: obscure failures when RAM is low

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Mon, 1 Jun 2015, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> I agree the GCC error is not an autotools fault and the libtool thing is
> not something I can roll my sleeves up and fix right now
>
> That is why I was asking about a way for configure to do a basic sanity
> test on available memory.  Maybe my question wasn't clear enough.  I
> don't expect configure to magically know how much memory is needed, just
> a simple test where the developer can suggest some fixed value (e.g.
> 1GB) and the configure script stops if there is less.

Running out of memory while running the compiler is not a common 
problem.  I have not observed it for least 17 years.

> I also fully understand this is not a bulletproof solution, other
> processes could still take memory after the build starts running and it
> fails.

The notion of "memory" is a very complex topic.  For example, a 
sufficiently large swap partition might allow the compiler to succeed 
(while taking more time).  This is not something that autoconf can 
reasonably test.

The amount of "over commit" on many GNU/Linux systems is often huge 
yet they continue to work fine.

  cat /proc/meminfo

  cat /proc/vmstat

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/