[webkit-dev] Deployment of new EWS Non-Unified builder

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Sat, May 21 2022 at 09:43:06 AM -0500, Michael Catanzaro 
<mcatanzaro at gnome.org> wrote:
> I would go even further and consider enabling unified builds only in 
> DEVELOPER_MODE (for CMake ports). For non-developer builds, 
> compilation time is much less important than limiting RAM usage to 
> reasonable levels. Using ninja's default parallelization level, I 
> recently started hitting OOM failures even on a machine with 64 GB 
> RAM! We have many people complaining that they cannot build on more 
> normal machines with 16 GB RAM. If we have an EWS to ensure the 
> non-unified build actually works, then it should be safe enough to 
> make it the normal supported path for non-developers, rather than 
> just a "best effort, let's hope it works today" thing.

I withdraw this proposal.

I thought that non-unified builds would significantly reduce peak RAM 
usage, but I was wrong. In fact, non-unified builds seem to require 
substantially more RAM at link time, perhaps because there are more 
object files to link together. On a desktop with 64 GB of RAM, I'm not 
able to link a non-unified build successfully without running out of 
RAM, but using a unified build it works fine. So my proposal was just 
totally off base.

Michael