[arch-general] Problems compiling big projects from AUR

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 2019-04-12 at 11:04 +0000, Celti Burroughs wrote:
> April 12, 2019 3:07 AM, "Jeanette C. via arch-general" <arch-general at archlinux.org> 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'