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Comment by ghoward | Hacker News Reader

Not GP, I am a Gentoo user that compiles ungoogled-chromium from source. I have a 16-core AMD CPU.

Despite that, it takes 4-8 hours to compile, due to two factors: 40,000+ separate targets, of which most are C++ files (famously slow to compile anyway).

And yes, 40,000+ separate targets is no exaggeration; ninja's first run claims about 18,000 targets, and after it finishes those, it generates a second ninja file that has to compile 23,000 targets.

I personally think it's worth it. Others may disagree, and I can't blame them. I have to run it overnight.

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Something is off there. I have Ryzen 3900X and it takes around 1-1,5 hours to compile ungoogled chromium.

It is really hard to keep up-to-date with security patches if you need to compile every few days from source with that time..

Edit: Also 32GB RAM which matters

Here with Ryzen 5700G, it takes almost 2.5 hours to compile chromium (doing one at the moment). This is with /var/tmp/portage mounted on tmpfs.

I have a 3900, no X, and 32 GB of RAM. I used to use a tmpfs, but I found that the build would run out of memory.

What if you try to compile in similar way than here? https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=ungoo...

Edit: Also, 3900 is 3900X running on eco mode (same spec but half power). You might get a lot more performance by tuning BIOS settings.

I'm not going to try to compile by hand, unfortunately. <shudder>

I'll take a peek at the BIOS, but I'll also no good at doing such things.

Do you have to do the make clean all, or equivalent, every time? Chrome has a ton of bits and bobs built in, right? Not all of which need to be updated every time (I guess?).

I wonder how it compares to the build time of something with equivalent functionality, like firefox.

The fact that it takes 1.5 hours on essentially an early 2000s supercomputer cluster full steam ahead to compile a fancy HTML viewer with integrated lightweight Java-like mini script language is bonkers.

You may be under-appreciating just how fancy this thing is.

I wonder how long does Java (which actually has a standard library, unlike JavaScript) take to compile? Would be an interesting comparison.

Far less on my machine. I think 1 hour?

It typically takes more than 20 hours on my dual core laptop. It's a pain, but once compiled I get the best of both worlds: fast as chrome, privacy friendly as firefox.

EDIT: Looks like popularity is on the rise [1]. Hopefully it will make it into the community repository.

[1] https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/packages/ungoogled-chromium

Are you building on an HDD? I went from 3-4 hours to under two when I switched to an SSD.

It's off an SSD. I have an SSD for my OS, which is where /var/tmp is on my machine.

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