GCC's Conversion To Git Is Being Held Up By RAM, a.k.a. Crazy DDR4 Prices

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GCC's Conversion To Git Is Being Held Up By RAM, a.k.a. Crazy DDR4 Prices

After converting the GNU Emacs repository to Git a few years back, Eric S Raymond has been working on the massive undertaking of transferring the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) repository in full over to Git. But the transition to GCC Git is being hampered since due to the massive size of the repository, Raymond's system is running under extreme memory pressure with 64GB of RAM...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GCC-Git-Conversion-RAM

[chuckula]

OK, for a hobby project I wouldn't throw money at RAM, but seriously? For a major part of the GCC development process 128GB of RAM is a monetary showstopper?


Here's what you need for $1,300: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...-638-_-Product

[Incidentally, if his existing system already uses 16GB DIMMs then you could get away with buying 64GB and upgrading too, so that's really a worst-case price]

For all the people who like to moan about everything, that's about an 8-hour day's gross wages for a freelance developer who charges $162.50/hr, and there are plenty of people out there charging more than that.

Apparently GCC is in hobby-project land when it comes to repository maintenance.

[AsuMagic]

This sucks but LOL this is pretty hilarious.
Did they consider memory dedup in kernel? Perhaps that could help, but it would be pretty surprising.

[Too7aoj7sie3eeTo]

Have you ever heard of .. (compressed) swap ?
This is hilarious.

[milkylainen]

I don't get how this can be an issue. Like for real?
I'm betting there would atleast be a bucketload of instances in the industry willing to throw a big ass server in his general direction.

[discordian]

Yeah, sounds weird. Apparently this is related to some conversion process with "reposurgeon"(python tool). Thats something they could do on a rent server for a couple days?

[Michael]

Yeah, sounds weird. Apparently this is related to some conversion process with "reposurgeon"(python tool). Thats something they could do on a rent server for a couple days?

ESR says in another email that the memory performance in clouds aren't good enough for him. The GCC Compile Farm already has high-power servers with 128+ GB of RAM on x86 and POWER, but he thinks his system is faster.

[caligula]

Have you ever heard of .. (compressed) swap ?
This is hilarious.

He probably has not. Or doesn't know about swap in general. People used to solve these sorts of issues with swap back in the day.

[caligula]

So is this huge amount of RAM only needed when switching the whole repository to git or do all gcc users need such huge users from now on?

[discordian]

Ok, but is this a one time conversion? Then why does speed matter so much.
or will they run this process every commit (cant imagine why)?

if i read about lack of ram i would expect that your speed will be hellishly bad, so the comment about his system beeing faster than another one with enough ram is weird aswell