How much memory to compile www/chromium?

[Mark Millard]

On 2019-Jan-1, at 10:21, bob prohaska <fbsd AT www.zefox.net> wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 18, 2018 at 09:49:03AM -0800, bob prohaska wrote:
>> 
>> Setting MAKE_JOBS_NUMBER_LIMIT=2 allowed www/chromium to compile successfully over
>> several days. The -DBATCH option was used, in hopes it'd fetch the right options. 
>> 
> 
> Just for fun I added a mechanical hard disk with a 4 GB swap partition and re-ran
> the www/chromium compilation with MAKE_JOBS_NUMBER_LIMIT unset, to see what happens.
> OOMA was turned off with vm.pageout_oom_seq="2048" in /boot/loader.conf.
> 
> After ~11 days the process finished. Log files of gstat output and make output are at 
> http://www.zefox.net/~fbsd/rpi3/swaptests/r342204/chromium/mech_sd/
> in case anyone's curious. The log files are around 100MB, it seems quickest to download 
> them to look around. Swap use peaked at 3522008 kB. If gstat is to be believed
> the bottleneck appears to be the mechanical hard disk, which showed near
> 100% busy when the microSD swap partition was around 15% busy. Apart from a few
> "indefinite wait..." warnings on the console there was no indication of errors.
> 
> As a further test, I'ved added two additional USB flash swap devices and am re-running
> the compilation of www/chromium. The swap layout is quite lopsided, with the USB flash
> devices having only 2 GB swap partitions on each, contrasting to the 4 GB swap partitions
> on the microSD card and mechanical disk. 
> 
> The first oddity is that top doesn't seem to see the extra swap space, reporting only 
> 7192M total.

If you start top before changing the swap space (swapon or
swapoff), top does not change to match: it does not monitor
the swap space total size over time. But I've no other clue
to the ordering that actually occurred.

> Swapinfo does seem to plausibly report swap status as
> Device          1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity
> /dev/mmcsd0s2b    4404252    52228  4352024     1%
> /dev/da0p1        4194304    50848  4143456     1%
> /dev/da2p5        2097152    28232  2068920     1%
> /dev/da1f         2097152    28060  2069092     1%
> Total            12792860   159368 12633492     1%
> 
> after running overnight.
> 
> "indefinite wait..." warnings on the console have returned in abundance with the use
> of USB flash swap, even though swap usage is still less than 200MB. 

You might want to report the types/models of the USB flash devices that
were in used. Also relevant is the past usage pattern and amount of
prior use on the USB flash devices.

===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com
( dsl-only.net went
away in early 2018-Mar)