Determining the amount of RAM required to build a particular OSS/FS application

[Michael Lueck <mlueck at lueckdatasystems dot com>]

I banged into a memory limit trying to build the latest ImageMagick at our hosting provider. Our server is build on Debian 6.0.7 as its core OS. So we have at our disposal:

gcc version 4.4.5 (Debian 4.4.5-8)

We successfully built ImageMagick several years ago, then version 6.3.9-2. We are trying to compile the latest version: 6.8.4-9.

Compiling along, we receive error: "virtual memory exhausted: Cannot allocate memory"

We believe the current ImageMagick requires more memory to compile than the prior version we built successfully.

Memory available to our remote connection to the server is as follows:

> free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         12072      10262       1809          0        175       8935
-/+ buffers/cache:       1151      10921
Swap:          258        137        120

ImageMagick support was unwilling to discuss with us memory requirements to successfully build / compile their software, stating that it is up to the compiler folks to determine how much memory their 
compiler requires to build a particular piece of software. Discussion thread here:

http://www.imagemagick.org/discourse-server/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=23190

I would like to have an accurate number of what the memory limit needs to be adjusted to, then I will contact our hosting provider with that recommendation.

Could someone please assist us in making some progress forward? Thank you.

Sincerely,

--
Michael Lueck
Lueck Data Systems
http://www.lueckdatasystems.com/