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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.




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


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?


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.


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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