Running `make -j` hangs and prevents other processes from running on MacOS inside of kitty

Learning
1

I tried compiling ocaml/ocaml, but compiling hangs on running ocaml doc.

Once it hangs, macOS will behave very weirdly with processes not being able to start. The only solution I have found once entering this state is to reboot.

I have found 3 workarounds:

(yes this is extremely weird)

2

Could it be that you’re simply swapping to disk?

Have you monitored the output of ˋtop’?

3

MacOS is UNIX (or at least, that’s where it began), so this is … disturbing.

  1. when you say make -j, do you mean literally that command? B/c one would think that, yeah (per @benjamin-thomas ) you might get swapping, but that wouldn’t cause a hang.

  2. you said make -j 8 prevents the problem. Can you try make -j 16, and higher powers of 2, to see whether it’s literally make -j, or just a very high concurrency ?

  3. just in order to further confine the issue of the terminal emulator, can you run the make command under nohup ? That should disconnect it from the terminal ?

  4. and for good measure, nohup make -j < /dev/null &

4

Adding even more context on this (genuinely!) fascinating macOS issue. Having run ./configure --disable-stdlib-manpages && make -j (which succeeds), it was repeatably the case that make -j manpages would fail. Most of the time it was possible to abort make with CTRL+C which would reveal that every single ocamldoc.opt invocation for the generating the stdlib manpages was hanging. And then everything gets weird - apps wouldn’t start, the C could be invoked, but programs emitted by clang simply did nothing!

5

There doesn’t seem to be any swapping (nor a high memory usage).

It fails for high values of make -j <value>. It has both failed and succeeded at -j96.

Nohup doesn’t change anything. It still fails in kitty but doesn’t fail in alacritty. (even though the process doesn’t even output to the terminal anymore). Same if running nohup make -j < /dev/null & disown

6

The only thing that springs to mind would be to do a SMART check on your disk?

Then verify the integrity of your file system?

On a Linux host, I could see myself launching a live USB (OS running on a USB key) to validate or invalidate a hardware/software issue.

But it looks like your options are quite limited with Apple gear unfortunately

7

I had already managed to compile with the foot terminal emulator on Linux but just in case it was caused just by kitty I tried on kitty on Linux (using Asahi linux) and it worked (not particularly surprising… although who knows at this point…).

8

There are other projects that almost-certainly have high concurrency in their builds Like GCC, or Emacs. Have you tried to build such other projects with “make -j” (or “make -j 512”) to see if they cause problems ? [In the spirit of exonerating the innocent to incriminate the guilty]

Also, have you had an success asking in MacOS forums?

ETA: and also in kitty forums ?