On Sun, 10 Jul 2016, Camm Maguire wrote: > Greetings, and thanks so much for your report! More reply later, but > just want to point out for now that the memory used for the build > depends on the memory available at runtime. These packages will build > just fine on machines with small memories. The memory usage algorithm > is a performance booster only.
Hello Camm. There are at least two problems with the current approach: * One of them (which I already pointed out) is that I can't measure how much this program really needs by looking at memory usage. I can do that for more than 3300 different packages in stretch, but I can't for maxima and axiom, which is a pity. * The other problem is that not only maxima takes as much RAM as I have, it seems to use all available SWAP as well! This would explain the effect "the more memory I have, the more memory it takes". Let's suppose that I build with 4 GB RAM and 4 GB SWAP. Then I measure that maxima takes 8GB and next time I will need 8 GB RAM to build. If maxima is going to take all the memory I have, whatever the amount, it should be the available RAM only, not available RAM + available SWAP. If it's not able to do that and it only takes the total memory in account, meybe it should assume that at least half of that is SWAP and avoid using it. Currently, it seems to assume that all the memory is available to use, which is not realistic for people using SWAP as a safety net. Thanks.
