RAM usage of building a system image

ufechner7 · October 14, 2026, 8:26pm

My script that is building a system image needs about 50 GB of RAM. This is very expensive. I am trying to use a swap file, but this is getting very slow.
See for example: Install KiteModels#main · OpenSourceAWE/AWEMeta.jl@2a4ca15 · GitHub

Did not finish in 4h, now trying 6h.

Any ideas how to reduce the RAM usage? I switched from ControlPlots.jl to MakieControlPlots.jl. Before it was kind of OK.

You can find the script that builds the system image here:

github.com/OpenSourceAWE/KiteModels.jl

test/create_sys_image.jl

main

# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2022, 2024, 2025 Uwe Fechner
# SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT

# activate the test environment if needed
using Pkg
if dirname(Pkg.project().path) != @__DIR__
    Pkg.activate(@__DIR__)
    Pkg.resolve()
    Pkg.instantiate()
end
@info "Loading packages ..."
using AtmosphericModels, Colors, ControlSystemsBase, DSP, Dierckx, DiscretePIDs,
    DocStringExtensions, JLD2, KitePodModels, KiteUtils, KiteViewers, LinearAlgebra, NLsolve,
    NonlinearSolve, OrdinaryDiffEqBDF, OrdinaryDiffEqCore, OrdinaryDiffEqNonlinearSolve,
    Parameters, REPL, Rotations, StaticArrays, StatsBase, Sundials, WinchModels
using BenchmarkTools, Documenter, PackageCompiler

@info "Creating sysimage ..."
push!(LOAD_PATH,joinpath(pwd(),"src"))

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Do you think using JULIA_HEAP_SIZE_HINT could help?

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RAM usage of building a system image

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