First, I am using amd64 Current, (8.99.25), on an Intel Core 2 Duo P8600, with 2G of physical memory. A while back, (probably over a year), I stopped using Firefox because when I tried to compile it I would get an out of memory error. This was around when Rust became a necessary component.
I didn't really understand the problem, but I switched to Seamonkey and forgot about it. The other day I decided to try building Firefox again. Like before, Rust started building and eventually the process threw and error and dropped out.
This time I looked more closely at the error messages, and I noticed the messages were a bit different. It mentioned tmp/ had a resource error. I did a "df -h" and noticed that tmp/ was set in tmpfs, but there was only 64M of space. So, I looked at /etc/fstab and sure enough I noticed the declaration had a size flag that was 64M, (as well as mode of 1777). I don't remember ever setting this when I installed the system, but it was a while ago.
Anyway, I edited fstab, and rebooted, then checked filesystem size, and sure enough /tmp/ was now 4G.
Now everything compiles, but it made me wonder, is there anything significantly different between NetBSD's compilation process versus FreeBSD? I noticed on a FreeBSD box I use that /tmp/ is not tmpfs and actually on the harddrive. Tmpfs should be faster, but I hadn't run into, or wasn't aware of limitations in the tmp directory size.
Thanks for any insight.