hardware: 2xPOWER3-II 450MHz/2GB RAM/36GB 10K disk oslevel -r: 5200-03 I'm not too much into the gcc bootstrapping process but I believe this occurs at stage2 (already using xgcc to compile), at first when the configure script for libstdc++ runs. The configure script is running at around a 1 (one!) check/minute rate on the system above(64bit kernel, JFS2). This leads to a build process duration of >12 hours on that hardware (without building gcj). I tried this with 3.3.4 and 3.4.3 now, both do about the same. In some mailing list archive I have found a hint to use bash for CONFIG_SHELL instead of the default AIX ksh, but this does not help much. The build process for 3.3.4 (a c and c++ only build) was successful otherwise. I'm still running the 3.4.3 bootstrap since about 18 hours now... The CPU load is less than 0.5 most of the time and topas reports a disk write rate of 1.5MB/sec _continuously_. Other autoconf-based packages used to configure within normal time frames, so I suspect there might be some special settings used in the gcc build process.
When AIX Bourne Shell is used for GCC bootstrap, bootstrap is extremely slow due to the interaction between the configure script and the shell. To speed up the process one has to use Bash. The AIX-specific installation notes mention this: http://gcc.gnu.org/install/specific.html#*-ibm-aix* If using Bash did not help, then CONFIGURE_SHELL probably was not set early enough. One either needs to define CONFIGURE_SHELL to Bash in a clean build directory before configuring GCC or one needs to invoke "make bootstrap" with both SHELL and CONFIGURE_SHELL set to Bash. Once GCC has been configured, it remembers /bin/sh in many locations and CONFIGURE_SHELL will not override the memory.