High RAM usage during colcon build

[matteogrechi]

Description

I'm working in WSL with 3.74GiB of RAM and 1GiB of swap (Neither I cannot add more RAM to the machine nor increase the swap partition). Whenever I try to compile the source the compiler gets killed, e.g.:

c++: fatal error: Killed signal terminated program cc1plus
compilation terminated.
gmake[2]: *** [src/CMakeFiles/moveit_task_constructor_core.dir/build.make:174: src/CMakeFiles/moveit_task_constructor_core.dir/storage.cpp.o] Error 1
gmake[1]: *** [CMakeFiles/Makefile2:256: src/CMakeFiles/moveit_task_constructor_core.dir/all] Error 2

I checked and both the RAM and the swap gets fully saturated. My questions are:

1. Is there a way to tell the compiler to launch less threads (--parallel-workers 1 it's not enough)?
2. Is it possible to provide a version working with pre-build binaries?

Environment

• ROS Distro: Humble
• OS Version: Ubuntu 22.04 (inside WSL 2)
• Source, commit hash 20be39797b17e460fda48975a0a8ee25f8ad87ac

Steps to reproduce

Run colcon build --mixin release --parallel-workers 1

Thank you very much!

[matteogrechi]

Possible solution to question number 1:

Before running colcon build, set the MAKEFLAGS environment variable to j1:

export MAKEFLAGS=-j1
colcon build --mixin release --parallel-workers 1

Sources:

• Stack overflow - Set number of threads used by make permanently
• ROS answers - colcon build - number of threads

[Ken-Andre]

Hi, I'm new to ROS and also hit myself on this issues that is not yet modified in the docs. the colcon build ros2 humble. I've upgrade also my memory up to 16Gb and have the last intell processor with 12 thread, also a Dedicated Nvidia Graphics Card.