Slow compiling? Check your memory
Today I got completely frustrated with GCC. I was doing some coding
on FlameRobin, changing just a single file. Save, run make - it takes
1.5 minutes or something for thing to get compiled and linked so I can test
it. I have a 1.6GHz CPU with 512 MB of RAM. Now, how could it be that
slow. But, one thing caught my eye: while linking the hard disk would work
like crazy. I looked and there was no swap usage, but RAM was used 99%. No
swapping, but obviously it had to release stuff from the cache and load it
back in.
Time for testing
I deleted the
executable and ran ‘make’ again. It took 55 seconds.
Too much. Ok, I closed down the browser, music player, even text editor.
New run: 43 seconds. Not good enough.
At this point I decided
to kill the beast. I shut down KDE, went back to console and
installed IceWM. Got back to X, installed SciTE to use it instead of
Kate (perhaps I should learn Emacs one of these days). Launched
Mozilla to blog about this and xmms instead of JuK. Run the experiment
again:
milanb@asus:~/devel/svn/flamerobin/rel-gtk2-wx280$ time -p make g++ -o flamerobin flamerobin_addconstrainthandler.o flamerobin_Config.o …etc. real 10.90 user 8.45 sys 2.07
ahahaahhaaaa.
Well, quite enough reason for me to go
back to IceWM, at least while developing in C++. Ok, now the real problem
is Workrave which (from reasons yet unknown) loads kdeinit and two more KDE deamons with it.
Perhaps I should just get 2GB of RAM and forget about the whole problem? Only thing bothering me is that this machine is a notebook, so it isn’t so easy to upgrade.