Last night, I synced CyanogenMod’s Android source code into my laptop. It took ~12 hours to complete. The Internet connection I have is 6 Mbps and to download ~9 GB of source code shouldn’t take that long. So I created a 512 MB VM on my Digital Ocean account.
I opted for the US$ 5/month VM which is a 1 Core, 512 MB RAM and 20 GB SSD. The VM DOES NOT have any swap space.
You know what happened? A few actually:
- Out of Memory while fetching
git://github.com/CyanogenMod/android_vendor_qcom_opensource_v8 - Out of Disk Space after fetching the above
Android’s source code has gotten large and it’s very much not recommended even to do the fetching (git pull) on such a low spec VM. You can easily solve the out-of-memory issue by adding a swap partition. Being an SSD VM, the performance degradation is acceptable.
However, you can’t cheat out-of-disk-space at all. The solution is simple: Get a bigger spec VM.
Just as a side note, here’s how to have a file swap partition added on runtime:
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/swap512mb bs=1024 count=524288
$ chmod 600 /mnt/swap512mb
$ mkswap /mnt/swap512mb
$ swapon /mnt/swap512mb
Now you have a temporary swap partition, do a cat /proc/meminfo to confirm.