Ninja and RAM/Memory usage

Hey folks.

I am using meson + ninja since ... well, 3 years or so, largely because other devs switched to it increasingly. Meson and ninja is an awesome combination. Hopefully we can abandon the GNU configure legacy one day. But anyway, this is a side issue.

I am very happy with the speed of meson + ninja, which is great. There is, however had, one concern that I have had in the past and this is in regards to the memory / RAM usage.

This may be my old computer here from 2017 failing slowly, or something. I have 16GB RAM and it is a fairly fast computer. I compile everything from source.

But in the last, say, 12 months or so I am noticing memory/RAM issues.

This was the case in the past too but it also deadlocks and freezes my computer. Again, this may be hardware related but ... the thing is, it only freezes so in certain projects, most of which use ninja.

For instance, an hour ago I tried to compile webkitgtk using these instructions:

https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/x/webkitgtk.html

This one is using ninja.

A few hours before that I had a similar issue with compiling the most recent node from source.

https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/general/nodejs.html

This one does not use ninja, though, so it may well be that something is wrong with my computer here. I am, however had, not really writing this issue from the point of view of my computer alone, because the secondary problem I have is that these almost consistently keeps on happening whenever I try to compile a larger program. It also happened to me in LLVM

• cmake recently, and perhaps 2 years ago, on the same machine, I did not have that issue. GCC versions changed too, binutils as well so perhaps my hardware is ok but the software is not so much ok.

Anyway.

So what does this have to do with ninja?

Well - my suspicion is that this all kind of has to do with one way or another with RAM or perhaps a CPU is semi-flawed or something.

Would it be possible to add more "fine-tuned" control towards ninja itself, directly? For instance, the bigger projects I don't mind if ninja compiles without maximum speed. I understand your rationale for that as the default - after all a ninja is fast and ninja should be fast. But a ninja should not die in the middle of the mission and get intercepted! No noob ninjas please. Translation: no fails when RAM or other issues arise.

Perhaps there are some conditionals or config values I could shift around, e. g. I could then set it before trying to compile, say, webkitgtk. Where ninja is very careful and not too aggressive. For smaller programs I never run into any of these issues by the way. So not sure what is up (or perhaps my CPU gets overloaded, I have to clean this machine up soon anyway).

Could there be more control added towards RAM usage and how greedy ninja is? I understand this is not a trivial issue to work with, so please feel free to close it, but it would be nice to get some feedback about this. If I am the only one with any such issues then that's ok, but perhaps others also have encountered problems (and, as said, it is hard to say who is at fault - could be meson too after all. But at the end of the day, even if these are separate projects or separate problems, they may indirectly affect ninja too, if people on lower cost machines can not easily compile stuff).