colcon build freezes on autoware.universe pointcloud_preprocessor package

[samehmohamed88]

While running colcon build ... for the docker based install, my system freezes, and the mouse/keyboard become 100% non-responsive.

I tested this more by downgrading the number of parallel workers, like so:

$ colcon build --parallel-workers 3 ... # the default is 12

But this also freezes and crashes my machine.

I then downgraded it even further to make it a sequential build; i.e. building only one package at a time, like so:

$ colcon build --executor sequential ...

This lead me to identify that the build freezes and crashes on pointcloud_preprocessor.

My system specifications are as follows:

os:                   Ubuntu 20.04, kernel 5.13.0-40-generic
cpu:                  12 x Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8750H CPU @ 2.20GHz, 2200 MHz
memory:               16GB
graphics card:        nVidia GP104M [GeForce GTX 1070 Mobile]

[xmfcx]

Autoware uses quite a lot of memory to build, could you try to increase the swap space if you have disk space available? Preferably on the SSD. If possible about 16 to 32GB of swap is recommended.

A tutorial for that: https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-add-swap-space-on-ubuntu-20-04/ (you don't need to do Adjusting the Swappiness Value step)

[xmfcx]

I recommend you to also monitor your system memory usage during the build process with a terminal window with htop. (you can install with sudo apt install htop)

[samehmohamed88]

Thanks @xmfcx your suggestion of increasing swap did fix the issue.

[angry-crab]

I had the same issue yesterday. --executor sequential worked for me.

[samehmohamed88]

@angry-crab I had already tried this several times. For my system, the only thing that worked is increasing swap. It was a fresh checkout of the Autoware, so it was trying to build all 195 packages. Even with --executor sequential the build cache was filling up my RAM

[yukkysaito]

Parallelism of packages and parallelism within packages must be suppressed.
It may be needed MAKEFLAGS.

MAKEFLAGS=-j1 colcon build --symlink-install --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release --executor sequential