Pavel's diary

Build time dependency on memory

The build machine I have for testing is equipped with 16 GB of RAM. It is a lot of memory. Expensive stuff.

So I decided to measure some parallel builds (build -P10, dmake -P4) with limited amount of memory and graphed it:



The interpretation is very easy - if you have 16GB of RAM, you do not need to limit the available memory to your operating system ;-) The rest is not that easy. It was very parallel build, and it is not efficient with 1G only (it took 41 minutes to build with 1G, 37 minutes with 2G, 32 minutes with 4G).

On the other side, having more than 8G was not needed at all. 8G build was 1731 seconds (average from five builds) and 16G was 1706 seconds. The gain is minimal.

What is remaining? I have to fix build on stock SUSE Linux 10.2 and select the right system based on the money we have now :-)