Memory blues

I recently started playing around with a Linode instance. It's a really nice service and I wanted to kick the tires with couple of Haskell projects. The smallest Linode instance comes with 512MB of memory, and this should be reasonably enough for everybody. Except for ghc and ld, it seems :)

The problem

I installed Yesod web framework from scratch using cabal

cabal install yesod

I quickly noticed that installing software with cabal caused a huge load spike to host. I whipped out my trusty htop and noticed that process ld (the linker). was sucking up 500MB of memory and compilation was (understandably) stuck since the host was swapping all the time.

The relevant ticket for GHC contained some information. I also came across a brilliant posting outlining some optimizations for limited memory hosts.

The fix

I tested giving the options to ghc, but unfortunately some packages flag out refused to compile with those. At least for some packages the linker parameters given with -optl were passed to gcc. After some twiddling I decided to give up.

Then I came across a Stack Overflow discussion about gold linker, which is experimental optimized linker. There's a Ubuntu package for that,binutils-gold which conveniently replaces the system ld with the experimental optimized linker.

So, it just installed it with command

sudo apt-get install binutils-gold

and rerun the

cabal install yesod

The compilation seemed to go through smoothly, and ld didn't cause any memory spikes. As such, using the binutils-gold package seemed to solve this particular memory blues.

The disclaimer

The gold linker is experimental software, and is known not to compile some software correctly (such kernel modules). As such, using it is a tradeoff. In my case the standard linker just didn't work. Fortunately, the experimental linker can be quite easily removed by uninstalling the binutils-gold package - system will revert back to stock ld.

Anyway, if you happen to run into this particular problem, try the binutils-gold. Rumour is that the optimized ld might even help with boost-heavy C++-projects.