Post #1546507

2026-04-14 03:57 UTC

@dotstdy @tedmielczarek @regehr I think what would really help is if a build system had the knobs to suspend a process if it consumes too much memory. ld eats more than 2 GB? pause it, let other processes finish, then let it restart I don't know if that's feasible

Replies (3)

@dotstdy@mastodon.social 2026-04-14 04:00

@whitequark @tedmielczarek @regehr yeah that's what I was getting at by backoff, suspending is hard because you're still holding the memory while you're suspended. Currently build scripts end up hard coding parallel linker limits of 4 or whatever, which is trivially broken with low memory systems, and trivially too conservative for large systems. So if you said 2gb in your own build script (you know the software after all) that would allow you to avoid the majority of issues open softwares hit.

Open ##1546508
@tedmielczarek@mastodon.social 2026-04-14 04:12

@whitequark @dotstdy @regehr cgroups might help on Linux but we're back to your original point about trying to do it in a portable way being a nightmare.

Open ##1546516
@regehr@mastodon.social 2026-04-14 04:19

@whitequark @dotstdy @tedmielczarek it doesn't seem hard (deadlocks notwithstanding)

Open ##1546518