there's probably some reduction in memory usage possible, but probably at the cost of increasing the [already long] build time. so it's just simple economics --- no-one's going to do that work because it would be useless to folks doing lots of builds, and a net loss in terms of opportunity cost.
On Mon, Oct 13, 2025 at 2:14 PM 'asquator' via Android Building <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hello, > > I'm new to AOSP and I have just completed the building process. It was not > easy to do it even on a pretty strong PC that handles all the [heavy] > development tasks I have. For the first time I had to create a swapfile of > 32G in addition to my 16G ram so the build process doesn't crash. I'm not > even talking about the 250G+ (!!!) it now takes on my disk. The compilation > itself was pretty quick, but the Soong scanning is really a serial RAM > killer. Does it load the entire dependency graph into memory? Or why is the > consumption so high? > I've seen the minimal resource requirements on the docs page, and it makes me > sad. Is it a techonogical limit we bumped into, the one that can't be > shifted, or is it a lack of optimizations? There is no way to tell Soong to > consume less memory and cache on disk, except swap or memory compression. And > it's still not clear to me why the build eats so much disk space - no way > Android itself is that heavy. > I'm probably missing a lot of things as a newcomer, and I'd be happy to get > some directions to relevant sources that explain why the build should be such > a pain (should it?). Are there any plans to optimize it in the future? Again, > the sole idea of having such high requirements just looks wrong to me... Seen > many similar posts in the past, but I don't think any of them got enough of > community attention. > > Thank you! > > -- > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the "Android > Building" mailing list. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected] > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/android-building?hl=en > > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Android Building" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/android-building/I7AUUF9E7AOwKELcLt6540Gni6pcWrmEZC3SaclPdvQi2e2Iv4Y4g_55nWG_S7Go3PA2qb1IcIXqX05dc-G4xfLHsax1z4d7VDv2tpXFuuo%3D%40proton.me. -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "Android Building" mailing list. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-building?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Building" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/android-building/CAJgzZooLYPUDBF6MnQS94QVCcgG3KO6EQk7VRXz1RMV6hr6qkw%40mail.gmail.com.
