On 05/08/2014 09:04 AM, Kent Borg wrote:
Compiling all of Android Open Source Project supposedly requires that much RAM, but I don't believe it. They are just saying that so people won't try on too slow a machine. Right?
Unfortunately, no. It really does suck up that much RAM. The compilation process hasn't really been a focus for the Android team.
I can certainly imagine uses for RAM, such as big databases in RAM, simulating the physics of the real world (weather prediction, Pixar rendering their new film, cosmology simulations of the big bang, etc.), but it is hard to come up with much more without resorting to strategies based on waste. How will I end of using my 16GB? How will you use 32GB?
Let me tell you, having that much filesystem cache is fantastic. I dislike IDEs (especially Eclipse, and doubly so Eclipse with the Android ADT plugin). But to work without an IDE you're going to be doing a lot of grep operations. With my box that has 16GB of RAM, I can grep across 250k LOC in a fraction of a second. The same operation on my box with 4G RAM takes anywhere from 30 sec to minutes (depending on if I have firefox and/or eclipse open).
I have another box that has 4G, and when running proguard on the aforementioned 250k LOC android app, it basically eats up all memory to the point where I can't run anything else on that machine if I don't want it to thrash.
I'm not saying that the Android build process /has/ to be this memory intensive, I'm just saying that it certainly /is/ that way currently. And given the availability of cheap RAM, it seems they have not much incentive to optimize that...
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