groan: installation

[Jeff Sturm]

On 4 Nov 2002 nferrier@tapsellferrier.co.uk wrote:
> I guess if it's not that it's the make processing of the loop.
>
> The other biggie (on my system anyway) is the proc time it takes to
> ranlib the libraries.

Both ar and ranlib want a lot of memory.  I tried running "vmstat 5"
during linking...  note that while the "free" column falls fast, there is
actually considerable CPU idle time available:

 r  b  w   swpd   free   si  so    bi    bo   in    cs  us  sy  id
 2  0  0  16056 214936    0   0    98     0 1053   390  60  39   1
 1  0  0  16056 214368    0   0    94    26 1054   379  60  39   1
 1  0  0  16056 212976    0   0    93     0 1052   372  61  39   1
 2  0  0  16056 208832    0   0   350    26 1064   375  53  37  11
 1  0  0  16056 110896    8   0  3160     0 1277   366  36  19  46
 1  0  0  16056  61920    2   0  6134    26 1539   747   9  11  80
 1  0  0  16056   5672    0   0  5386     0 1458   691  10  17  72
 1  0  0  16056   4880    0  66  4058    66 1282   511   6  26  68
 1  0  0  16056   4824    0   0  1252     0 1101   163  32  47  20
 0  0  0  16056 227080    0   0    13    26 1034    22   6  20  74
 0  0  0  16056 227080    0   0     0    26 1032     5   0   0 100

This is on an alpha-linux machine with 512MB main memory.  With less than
that the VM system starts to churn.

Linking libgcj.so is far worse than this; ld needs around 300MB and 8
minutes CPU time to complete.

Jeff