Linux build times, and VTK optimized builds

[Brent Burton]

On Mon, 29 Nov 1999, ytlee wrote:
> Brent wrote
> > [... build on my machine takes 30 minutes...]
> 
> Are you started with a fresh copy of Redhat, then add mesa, tcl/tk and vtk?
> I have done that more than a dozen times with different machines and
> configurations. The time to compile and to generate those *.so for common,
> graphics and imaging (no patented or contrib) ranged from over 36 hours (I
> killed that before completion) for 486 50mh to  11 hours for AMD k6.
> 
> Would you please go thru your steps and list the switches please.

Again, the machine is running Redhat 5.1 with a kernel built for
the local hardware (network, sound, etc).  To that I added
MesaGL.  Tcl/Tk are version 8.0 RPMs installed from Redhat disks,
and VTK was 2.0 but recently updated to 2.4.  GCC is version
2.7.2.3 that came with Redhat 5.1.

All VTK sources are on the local disk; there is no network access
to compile this.

Next, VTK is configured with:
  ./configure --with-mesa --with-tcl --with-patented --with-shared

and user.make has:
  USER_CFLAGS =
  USER_CXXFLAGS =

So, no optimizations are enabled.  If -O or -O2 are specified, it can
indeed take longer, perhaps 3-4 times longer (2 hours by my estimate) if
-O2 is specified.

My machine is not tuned specially, so that's really all there is
to what I do.  In the past I've compiled on 100MHz Pentium (couple
hours minimum) and on SGI Oxygen^2 boxes (3-4 hours due to NFS
access).  But I *never* have seen a compile time longer than 4
hours.  Something is slowing your builds down; the VTK code base
is "only" about a quarter million lines of code and for modern machines
it just doesn't take all that much time.  I've watched GCC's memory
usage during a build, and it only creeps up to 12MB or so.  128MB
is more than enough unless there are many other processes and/or
Linux is swapping.

I hope this helps -- I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw
11 hour compile times.

-Brent




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