Low memory environment

Internals & Design
1

I have an old netbook running Lubuntu with an atom dual core cpu and 1GB of RAM and 1GB of swap. Last week I tried compiling 0.7 alpha on it and everything went fine (although really really really slow, ~10x compared to my work laptop) except precompilation, which filled up the entire RAM and swap and then crashed. Julia 0.6.3 Compiled just fine.

I would prefer to not skip precompilation because the machine is so slow. Is there a way to make precompilation use less memory? E.g. by splitting it into several parts so that it will consume less memory? I guess that this may be of general importance because people run Julia on embedded devices such as the Raspberry Pi.

As a side note: OpenBLAS does not recognize the atom processor as a target automatically.

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2

Check out zram:

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3

I could switch to a swap file instead of a swap partition and simply increase it for the time of the build. I did not know about zram, thanks I will try this!

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Try comment out including the precompile file in stdlib/Pkg/src/Pkg.jl, it is known that it results in a bit higher memory requirement.

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I solved it by adding a swap file, zram seemed a bit too complicated for a one time thing.

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