Day Two - Successfully installed PyTorch from source

August 10, 2025

Phew!

Thoughts

Finally I managed to install PyTorch from source following the docs and lots of articles from medium that I sadly didn't save. Thankfully I had perplexity pro which I used a lot and helped me tremendously. Still, for that niggling issue - I had to get my hand dirty and scour debug log and internet for the fixes.

Journal

  • Ansible playbook that I wrote helped me a lot to breeze past the initial required stuff.
  • Followed installation document from pytorch repo in github.
  • While building pytorch, I crashed my PC cause apparently 64GB is not enough for this hungry monster.
  • Found a way that MAX_JOBS=5 is the parameter I can set to have this issue resolved.
  • Monitored my memory and CPU usage. CPU usage was 100% intermittenly but memory stuck around 20GB, sometimes 30GB.
  • I tried setting up to 10 but it instantly shot up my memory usage, so stuck with 5 and went with the build.
  • It ran for an hour maybe, I just left it and slept like a log. When I came back - I found finally that it installed and it worked!
  • It worked! Wow!

Learnings

  • General - Humbled by Linux. Just installed bunch of stuff. Not really.
  • Related to AI - Nah.