Build consumes too much memory on 8gb M1

• Component: Tools / Tests
• Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

[Kimmo Kinnunen]

Build should take into account the number of performance cores, number of efficiency cores and memory.
My M1 has 8gb and seems to build with 8 clang processes that take 1gb each. This causes swapping and cpu is being used in kernel_task instead of clang..

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/79726938>

[Elliott Williams]

I'm not sure if there is much we can do about the underlying issue of how heavy our compile tasks are.

In my most recent testing, on a 20-core Mac Studio, the system peaked at 32GB memory usage during a build. For comparison, on a 24-core / 16 GB linux system I recently built WebKitGTK on, I had to limit the number of concurrent jobs to 14 to avoid running out of memory.

On Apple platforms, we can control the amount of parallelism, but only (easily) from build scripts. I'm not convinced we should do this project-wide, because:

- On systems like yours, building from Make would magically be faster than building the same scheme/targets in Xcode.
- Less parallelism would be available for non-memory-intensive parts of the build, like copying files and generating code.


That said, you can customize it yourself via defaults:

    defaults write com.apple.dt.Xcode IDEBuildOperationMaxNumberOfConcurrentCompileTasks 6

or

    make ... ARGS="-IDEBuildOperationMaxNumberOfConcurrentCompileTasks 6"

[Kimmo Kinnunen]

Yeah, it's mostly not a real problem..
I was thinking the realistic solution would be to set IDEBuildOperationMaxNumberOfConcurrentCompileTasks as something like min(#cores, #GBs - 2) but if Xcode doesn't support it it's unrealistic to get it done.