compiling dolfin applications freezes my system

On Thu, Dec 08, 2011 at 07:15:48PM -0000, Patrick wrote:
> New question #181315 on DOLFIN:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/dolfin/+question/181315
>
> Hello,
> I think I have a problem with too little memory (2 GB) in my linux system.
> When I compile some of the dolfin demos (for example navier-stokes), the computer almost freezes (the mouse pointer doesn't move, I cannot type commands to kill the compilation process). After about 10 minutes the compilation has crashed with the following message:
>
> $ make
> [100%] Building CXX object CMakeFiles/demo_navier-stokes.dir/main.cpp.o
> c++: Internal error: Killed (program cc1plus)
> Please submit a full bug report.
> See <file:///usr/share/doc/gcc-4.4/README.Bugs> for instructions.
> make[2]: *** [CMakeFiles/demo_navier-stokes.dir/main.cpp.o] Error 1
> make[1]: *** [CMakeFiles/demo_navier-stokes.dir/all] Error 2
> make: *** [all] Error 2
>
> For some other dolfin demos this happens only if I have more memory-hungry applications like firefox running at the same time.
>
> Is it possible to set some options in the CMakeLists.txt or as
> arguments to 'make' such that the compiler allocates less memory?
> The same problem arises when I install FEniCS using the dorsal
> script.

It is a known problem that compilation of DOLFIN requires a large
amount of memory (in particular the generated SWIG module). We will
try to resolve it in the future. If you don't use Python, you can
disable the Python interface in the CMake configuration.

For the compilation of demos, try to recompile the form files with FFC
and experiment with options to reduce the code size. Type 'man ffc'
and experiment with options like -fquadrature_degree,
-fno-evalute_basis etc.

--
Anders