Following a 3,438 minute hiccup, What He Said has returned.

I've been trying to install the Ruby programming language on this server for some time, mostly so that I can doodle about with Ruby on Rails. I had aborted two previous attempts after the first twenty-something hours and a host of out-of-memory errors from the occasional sloppily-written daemon.

This time though, I was going to go for the gusto and force 'er on through. Ruby itself compiled in a reasonable amount of time, but then it decided to install its documentation. For some reason, doing that required all of the memory, and then some, on my server. Poor Gentoo started thrashing madly, and I gradually killed services to lighten the load, eventually shutting down e-mail, database, and the webserver that's responsible for what you see here.

Three thousand, four-hundred, and thirty-eight minutes later -- or just over 57 hours -- and it had finished. Only about an hour of that involved the CPU; the rest was devoted to virtual memory page swaps as the Ruby process consumed well beyond this box's meagre 128MB of physical RAM.