Left the Build Running

Dandelion
In March I made a few attempts to compile the 2.2 branch of Swift on my Raspberry Pi 2s. The attempts weren’t successful, and unfortunately I didn’t have time to troubleshoot further. These build attempts did have an interesting failure case, though. Rather than failing with an error they would simply get stuck attempting to generate libswiftStdlibStubs.a, pegging a single CPU core at 100%:

...
[510/560] Building CXX object stdlib/public/stubs/CMakeFiles/swiftStdlibStubs-linux-armv7-static.dir/UnicodeNormalization.cpp.o
[511/560] Generating ../../.././lib/swift/linux/libswiftStdlibStubs.a
[512/560] Linking CXX static library lib/swift_static/linux/armv7/libswiftStdlibStubs.a
[513/560] Generating ../../.././lib/swift_static/linux/libswiftStdlibStubs.a

So what happens if you forget that you started a build like this and leave it running for ten days? Well….I forgot, and found out:
Never ending build

Yes, that single process has used 247 hours of CPU time.

And what about the CPU temperature? As part of my current build script I log the CPU temperature from /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp every five minutes for the duration of the build:
CPU temperature for a 10 day build

On the left side of the graph we can see higher CPU temperatures peaking around 67°C when all four cores were in use. While the CPU stayed at its maximum clock rate (900MHz) until I stopped the build, with only a single core in use it spent most of the ten days between 44°C and 50°C.1

Fortunately This Happened on a Pi

Occasionally I spin up high-powered VMs on a certain cloud service to see how long it takes to compile Swift on something more powerful than a Raspberry Pi 2. Since I only keep these VMs online for less than an hour this is quite affordable, but I always worry that I’ll forget to remove one of them and end up a month later with a bill for hundreds or even thousands of dollars of usage.

For me, this is one of the reasons I love the Raspberry Pis: The only recurring cost of keeping them running is their power consumption, and even with Japan’s moderately-high electricity prices a fully-loaded Raspberry Pi 2 could cost less than $5/year to run.2

Even if you leave the build running, they aren’t going to break the bank.


  1. These fluctuations in temperature are most likely due to changes in the ambient temperature of my room. [return]
  2. The current draw for a Raspberry Pi 2 under load has been measured at around 420 mA, or 2.1 watts. Assuming electricity costs around 22 yen per 1kWh, this would come to about 405 JPY/year or about 3.74 USD as a write this post. At this point the efficiency of your USB adapter becomes an issue. [return]