Just my US$0.02 but is your system paging during the compile?  vmstat
should give you enough info to check.  I couldn't build a 1.4.1 kernel on a
386SX16 with 8MB of RAM.  Adding memory to get to around the 12MB level
allowed a compile to complete but I don't remember how long it took.

Steven Grunza
steven_grunza@ieee.org

At 12:46 AM 2/15/00 -0500, Nathan J. Williams wrote:
><jon@fork.yi.org> (Jonathan R. Hinds) writes:
>
>> This does not seem to be too much slower. And the kernel is still taking
>> upwards of 12 hours to compile.
>
>Nobody seems to have mentioned this yet, but over the years the
>compiler we ship has gotten bigger and bigger and slower and slower,
>and we also have cranked up the default optimization to -O2. egcs
>*crawls* with -O2. 
>
>Are you actually convinced that you're disk-bound? Have you had a look
>at iostat output while the compile is running to see if you're
>compute- or disk-bound? 
>
>On an 8M 486/66 under 1.4.1, I found that I couldn't build a kernel
>with -O2. I let it run for about 48 hours before giving up; it was
>just paging itself to death.
>
>        - Nathan
>
>