I can't really consider a 166MHz/64MB machine slow and small
(looking at my firewall appliance at 66MHz/32MB and dealing with
embedded systems with 8MB of RAM - granted then never compile anymore).
Getting old? Yes.  "slow" not for my def of "slow".

Try building on a 32MB sparc 1 or 2 or a 486/50.

-pipe is good if you have RAM to spare.  Perhaps it could be added
if there's a way to programatically check RAM size for > 128MB.

Quoting Bang Jun-Young (junyoung@mogua.com):
> On Thu, Jul 04, 2002 at 09:26:09PM +0900, Izumi Tsutsui wrote:
...
> > I think you should also check it really faster even on slower
> > (and less memory) machines. Modern machines are always fast anyway :-)
> 
> I have just tested with a plain old Pentium 166 machine that has 64MB of memory:
> 		GENERIC
> With -pipe:	  45:36
> Without -pipe:	1:13:48
> 
> Obviously, -pipe was effective on a slow machine as well.
> 
> One thing interesting here is, with -pipe swap size grew up to 10MB
> during build, while without -pipe no swapping occurred.