Bug#726009: Insufficient RAM on build-machines (was Bug#726009: yade: FTBFS on i386 (and others))

[Steve Langasek]

severity 726009 serious
thanks

This remains a serious bug.  Your package, which previously built on
multiple architectures, is now failing to build due to memory exhaustion. 
While in some circumstances it is permissible to remove the old binaries and
drop support for an architecture, this remains a serious bug until this has
been done.  (And anyway, your package won't reach testing in the current
state, so is de facto unreleasable.)

On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 09:00:36PM +0200, Anton Gladky wrote:
> severity 726009 wishlist
> retitle 726009 Yade requires too much RAM for building
> thanks

> thanks for bug-report. The problem is, that all build-failures are due
> to insufficient RAM on build-machines [1]. I do not really know how to
> "fix" that except of backlisting of some machines, as was suggested by
> Julien [2]. The same package builds fine on Launchpad's PPA. It seems,
> the package builds only on machines, where >4Gb RAM is available.

This diagnosis is incorrect.  The error you are hitting here is not that you
are exhausting the available memory on the machine, it's that you're
exhausting the *address space* on the machine.  Adding more memory to the
buildd would have zero effect, because you're on a 32-bit system which has a
limit of 4GB of address space anyway.  (In practice, I believe this is 3GB
for userspace and 1GB for kernel on i386.)

The buildd almost certainly has swap already, giving it total available
memory in excess of 4GB, but that doesn't help if you have a single process
- in this case g++ - that needs more than 3GB all to itself.

If this same package version built on Launchpad but is failing to build in
Debian unstable, then you should look at differences in toolchain versions
between the two.  It's possible that Ubuntu has a compiler fix that isn't
yet available in unstable; it's equally possible that the successful builds
in Launchpad were done with an earlier toolchain, and that there's a more
recent regression in g++ memory usage.  Either way, it's not the buildd's
fault.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
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