trouble building rakudo

Paul (>):
I try building rakudo from git clone git://github.com/rakudo/rakudo.git but during make it hangs forever (12+ hours) at

/usr/local/bin/parrot  perl6_s1.pbc --target=pir src/gen_setting.pm > src/gen_setting.pir

While it hangs at that line the linux (Debian 5.0 Lenny) box starts lots of swapping activity.

Anybody have any ideas what might be happening?

----- Original Message ----

From: Carl Mäsak <cmasak@gmail.com>
To: Paul Simon <getpsimon@yahoo.com>
Cc: perl6-users@perl.org
Sent: Sun, November 22, 2009 11:08:45 AM
Subject: Re: trouble building rakudo

Paul (>):
Yes, that step is pretty resource-intensive.

From your description, it sounds like Rakudo could use a little more
memory during compilation. On my computer, that compile step takes
about 3 minutes, and sucks up about 750 MB of RAM. My guess is that
you have less than that free when you're building Rakudo.

// Carl

On Sun, 2009-11-22 at 08:15 -0800, Paul Simon wrote:
The system has only 256 MB with few resources being used. That's a big difference
between 12+ hours and 3 minutes! Maybe I should invest in more RAM :-)

----- Original Message ----

From: Geoffrey Broadwell <geoff@broadwell.org>
To: Paul Simon <getpsimon@yahoo.com>
Cc: Carl Mäsak <cmasak@gmail.com>; perl6-users@perl.org
Sent: Sun, November 22, 2009 12:35:13 PM
Subject: Re: trouble building rakudo
Yep, if you see swapping, more RAM is probably the single most effective
performance enhancer you can possibly throw at it. The slowdown from
swapping to a spinning disk completely swamps all performance
differences between CPUs, for instance.

FWIW, the next thing to improve depends on your common tasks: a solid
state disk and a better video card are usually the best bets. The SSD
is great for compiles, program startups, and other disk-intensive
processes. (Get a good one, the cheap ones are awful.) The video card
is most useful if you do 3D, watch videos, or have a desktop that uses a
"compositing engine". If you just use twm to run xterms, it's not all
that valuable. :-)

Still, both of those are WAY further down the list than getting enough
RAM to do the compile in main memory.