Can GCC use more than 4G while compiling ?

Ian Lance Taylor iant@google.com
Thu Feb 14 02:06:00 GMT 2008


Tomas Kalibera <kalibera@cs.purdue.edu> writes:

> GCC runs out of memory while compiling my very large generated source
> file. Although I have x86_64 with more than 4G of RAM, it seems that
> GCC only uses something less than 4G. Is there a way to allow GCC to
> use more ? Something like ggc-heap-size...
> 
> I'm using GCC 4.2.3, compiled from sources, gcc binary is a 64-bit
> executable.

What is the exact error message?  Are all the compiler binaries 64-bit
executables?

gcc should not run out of memory until malloc or mmap fail to allocate
any more memory.  There is no maximum heap size.  gcc's garbage
collector doesn't run at arbitrary times; in particular it doesn't run
when there is an allocation failure, nor when the heap reaches a
certain size.

Ian



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