Two months ago I had written an article on tuning GCC parameters for compilation under low-memory VPS, by limiting the maximum memory it can use, which is often useful on user-bean-counter based VPS’s (OpenVZ and non-SLM Virtuozzo). It worked in most cases on my 256Mb VPS at VPSLink, but in some circumstances the packages just won’t compile.

There is an interesting forum post explaining how you can get Gentoo to emerge essential packages on VPSlink’s basic VPS with only 64Mb of memory! I originally thought it would be impossible, but by mangling GCC’s garbage collection parameters it indeed can be done.