[bullen]

Aha, I only compile on ARM so I got no room to increase RAM...

Is it the same with g++? I have 4GB so I should be able to compile with 4 cores, but the processes only fill 2-3 cores even when I try make -j8 on a 8 core machine and then locks the entire OS until it craps out?!

Something is fishy...

[ahepp]

Why are you compiling on ARM with only 4GB RAM? Wouldn't it make more sense to cross compile from a machine with more resources, if you cared about build speed? (maybe there's a good reason not to do that, idk)

If it's crapping out when you give it -j8, that seems to strongly suggest you're running into limited resources somewhere.

I'm no expert in the intricacies of parallel builds, but as far as I know you can still have dependencies between targets that will limit parallelism.

[pirocks]

This is just a low end/uncommon hardware problem. I typically do make -j16 on a 4 core x86 system and it just works. You are probably running out of ram and the swapping resulting in that instability.

[rbanffy]

Ideally compilation is CPU intensive. Unless you are constrained on IO, it won't improve your compilation much.

[drmpeg]

A swap file is your friend.

[bullen]

Actually, you win, swap was set to 0 by default! :D

Also I only have 2GB (in 32-bit though)! Xo

High karma HN users are toxic downers.

[jcelerier]

if you are in 32-bits you could still have trouble in the future though.

source: two days ago I had the exact same problem, so I mounted a 32gb swap file over an NFS drive because my SD card was 2gb (don't ask) and it still failed because ld tried to use more than 4gigs of ram