It's not hardcoded. Its a limit in different places. On the 32-bit buildds, no one process can address that much memory anyway.
On the 64-bit buildds, many of them don't have (or didn't when I left :P - the situation may have changed) enough RAM that having a large swap partition makes sense - if a build thrashes too much, it will timeout and be killed. (So the rule is 'builds must complete without causing the build machine to thrash'). Now, for *some* of the builder machines we could run larger VMs with 8GB of RAM, but we have no way in the current software of restricting the scheduling builds onto them, so shogun would simply end up failing much of the time when it scheduled onto smaller VMs. Could we discard all the smaller machines and just run a smaller set of such larger VMs? Sure. But that then ends up wasting physical ram for most of the VMs most of the time. I accept that there is a definite issue for your sofware. However, there isn't a code bug here AFAICT. I suggest filing a support ticket if you want to take it further in the operational direction. That said, even for a scientific operation, various things we've learnt about software maintenance - such as having a single clear focus for a module - will still apply, won't they ? Building a mismash of other projects and doing - I presume - a static link [why else would you include webkit in your build?] - is going to pose maintenance and and robustness issues. It is of course your perogative to accept your build footprint as a given rather than something that can be addressed. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1090819 Title: libshogun-dev upgrade impossible - shogun-octave missing due to 4GB out-of-memory compilation error To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad-buildd/+bug/1090819/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs