http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=54179
--- Comment #7 from Jason Vas Dias <jason.vas.dias at gmail dot com> 2012-08-05 12:21:10 UTC --- Thanks for your response ! I think the cc1 process is somehow operating in slow motion, even though I've pinned the CPU frequency to 1.8 GHz (it will crash if I don't reduce it soon - so this is not a "slow machine" issue!) . cc1 is writing about one line every 2 minutes to its assembler output file: ... 12:10:14 write(3, "3\n.L2088:\n\tmovq\t(%rbx), %rdi\n\tca"..., 4096) = 4096 ... 12:12:24 write(3, "%edi\n\tmovq\t32(%rbx), %rbx\n\tcall\t"..., 4096) = 4096 ... I think this is because it has to hold a huge chunk of "contiguous" memory : $ ps -o 'vsz rss %mem' -p 3863 VSZ RSS %MEM 258444 125752 7.3 So it is trying to hold @1.25GB of contiguous RAM. (my machine has 2GB). These memory requirements are solely due to the size of the .c file (1.8MB) . Why can't they be reduced somewhat?