Review minimum hardware specs

[tonytheodore]

http://mxe.cc/#requirements

It's very hard to quantify minimums, but I've found 8GB memory (with 12GB swap) and 60GB storage to be "safe" for Linux VMs. (Note that both swap and disk are on dynamically expandable storage).

What specs are workable for both VMs and physical hardware?

[TimothyGu]

LOL none of my physical machines have that much RAM...

[starius]

I am building MXE on Google Cloud Platform using smallest possible VM instance (1 vCPU, 0.6 GB memory). I build using build-pkg. The platform provides a range of VMs. In future I want to build each commit/pull request on all supported distributions. We can speed up builds by splitting by target.

[starius]

1 vCPU, 0.6 GB memory machine failed while building gcc. Probably 0.6 GB is too low.

[starius]

build-pkg completed on machine with 6 vCores and 5.6 Gb RAM (min amount of RAM for machine with 6 vCores). Target: i686-w64-mingw32.static. Time of first pass: 8 hours. Disk usage: 20/60Gb.

[TimothyGu]

@starius, can you test the minimum RAM needed for 4 vCores since that's more common physically? ulimit should be able to help with RAM testing.

[starius]

Unfinished build using build-pkg on Jessie machine with 1 vCore and 2Gb RAM. Target x86_64-w64-mingw32.shared takes 15 hours to complete.

[starius]

@TimothyGu, there are following standard options:

In addition, custom machine can be created. For 2 vcores, min memory is 1.8 Gb. For 4 vcores, min memory is 3.6 Gb. I am going to test builds on both of them without build-pkg.

[starius]

15 Gb of storage for one target is not sufficient. Rebuilding with 30 Gb.

Output of time before it failed on 4 vcpus:

real    418m41.043s
user    1036m36.011s
sys     77m23.822s

[starius]

2 vcores with 1.8 Gb RAM failed on building pcl with wrror message "virtual memory exhausted: Cannot allocate memory"

time output:

real    528m47.000s
user    785m54.319s
sys     59m45.180s

[starius]

4 vcores with 3,6 Gb - successful build of target i686-w64-mingw32.static without build-pkg.

real    475m38.539s
user    1081m41.348s
sys     81m25.769s

Disk utilization: 14/30 Gb.