Reducing Gnu Make's memory consumption?

[Dan Kegel]

We all know "recursive Makefiles are considered harmful".
Yet monolithic Makefiles can also have performance issues.
In particular, for very large projects, the Make process
can use hundreds of megabytes of memory.  The amount
of memory used by Make seems in my tests to be
about three times the size of the Makefile.  For
automatically generated Makefiles being run on
machines with a 1GB user address space, this means
the largest possible Makefile is about 300MB.
While this concern is largely theoretical,
and the obvious workaround is to generate smaller Makefiles,
it still seems worthwhile to ask if anyone has looked
into reducing the memory consumption of gnu Make.


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