April 12, 2019 3:07 AM, "Jeanette C. via arch-general" wrote:

The thing that happens is for the AUR build process to swap massive amounts of data, grinding the system almost to a halt and finally failing without much of a reason. Nothing typically source code or linkage related.

Are you using an AUR helper to run the build, or are you running it manually using makepkg? It seems likely to me that your AUR helper is building somewhere under /tmp, which is of course a tmpfs and thus entirely resident in RAM — and thus causing massive and unnecessary swapping. ~Celti

On 4/12/19 3:33 PM, Ralf Mardorf via arch-general wrote:

On Fri, 2019-04-12 at 11:04 +0000, Celti Burroughs wrote:

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April 12, 2019 3:07 AM, "Jeanette C. via arch-general" wrote:

...

The thing that happens is for the AUR build process to swap massive amounts of data, grinding the system almost to a halt and finally failing without much of a reason. Nothing typically source code or linkage related.

Are you using an AUR helper to run the build, or are you running it manually using makepkg? It seems likely to me that your AUR helper is building somewhere under /tmp, which is of course a tmpfs and thus entirely resident in RAM — and thus causing massive and unnecessary swapping.

I agree on the tmpfs guess. However, when not using a helper, users might anyway tend to do the manual build process in tmpfs. OTOH I sometimes still use a discontinued helper. For small software I just run the helper and for large software I run an alias [1], to build outside tmpfs.

When using the manual build process, then depending on the size of the software to build, I also chose between tmpfs and no tmpfs for the build directory.

The usage of tmpfs isn't necessarily related to the tools somebody does use to build packages ;).

[1] $ grep naourt .bashrc alias naourt='echo "Not AnOther User Repository Tool";rm -rf /{.,}tmp/yaourt-tmp-$(id -un);yaourt --tmp /.tmp'

yaourt is discontinued. I use Trizen when i really need to use Aur helper. Many options, it's possible to specify other directory than /tmp -- Maderios

On 4/12/19 4:23 PM, Ralf Mardorf via arch-general wrote:

On Fri, 2019-04-12 at 15:50 +0200, leoutation@gmx.fr wrote:

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On 4/12/19 3:33 PM, Ralf Mardorf via arch-general wrote:

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OTOH I sometimes still use a discontinued helper. ^^^^^^^^^^^^ yaourt is discontinued. ^^^^^^^^^^^^ More important:

"Warning: AUR helpers are not supported by Arch Linux. You should become familiar with the manual build process in order to be prepared to troubleshoot problems." - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_helpers

Jeanette didn't mention to use a helper at all.

Sure. I wrote: "I use Trizen when i really need to use Aur helper." It's usefull to search/test/install packages with a lot of dependencies. Most of time, it's useless. It's like Arch: know what we are doing, otherwise, do not do it... :) -- Maderios

Is it possible you haven't disabled the `-j', e.g. `MAKEFLAGS' in /etc/makepkg.conf? ... Hey hey Ralph,

Apr 12 2019, Ralph Corderoy has written: ... thanks, it turned out that the -j option had crept back in. Possibly something during the system update/copy went wrong. Thanks a lot. Thanks everyone, best wishes, Jeanette ... Jeanette, You have to be careful with the -j option. Some packages are capable of using multiple jobs, but there are a whole lot of packages that can't. So make sure whatever you are compiling supports multiple jobs, otherwise a -j1 option may be the quickest overall.