Steven Elling -- Thanks for your thorough analysis of this distcc trap. I will double check my config, as I am about to recompile gcc also.
-rdg On Thu, 2003-12-04 at 19:26, Steven Elling wrote: > If your using distcc, have multiple processors, etc. be very careful > with using the '-j' option without a number in the MAKEOPTS variable. > > I recently did an update of glibc to glibc-2.3.2-r3 and after a while of > compiling my system was freezing. I would start the emerge process and > walk away because I knew it would take a while. When I came back to the > system later on, the drive light was lit solid and would not shut off. > The system would also not respond to user input even though I could > switch from VT to VT. Everything I saw happening pointed to a drive > failing only part of the time. > > It took me a while to figure out what was going on but I started the > emerge process on one VT and sat there a watched it. On another VT, I > used watch to periodically display the disk usage, as well as, the > output of vmstat. Pretty soon I found out what was going on. > > The system started to slow to a crawl and I happened to look at the > process table. There were upward of 870 process running on my box > during the compile. Ouch! > > Essentially, I was slowly fork bombing my box because I was using the > '-j' option without a number in MAKEOPTS. The man page for make states, > "If the -j option is given without an argument, make will not limit the > number of jobs that can run simultaneously." With most packages this is > not a problem but, in the case of glibc, the source directory has > several components to compile and there were enough components that it > was bringing my system down. > > Therefore, if you find your system freezing during a emerge like mine > did, check your MAKEOPTS. > > > Steven Elling > > > P.S. Developers: You might want to look into adding a number to the '-j' > option in MAKEOPTS during emerges of certain packages to account for > this situation. > > > -- > [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list -- Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes! -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
