Why is Chromium 65GB big when built from source?

[Marko J]

So, why does Chromium take up such a huge amount of space when built from source? Yet when you download and install either Chrome or Chromium, they are not much bigger than 200 MB! I mean, that is a HUGE discrepancy! Do I really need to dedicate 65GB on my hard drive to a web browser (if I want to build Chromium from source)? Or is there a way to remove some unnecessary files after building?

[Ramesh Srigiriraju]

Production builds of Chrome and Chromium are probably using compiler flags to optimize the size of the executable.  I'd have to know more about your build process to find out why it's taking up 65 GB.

On Sat, Nov 21, 2015 at 11:51 AM, Marko J <mark...@gmail.com> wrote:

So, why does Chromium take up such a huge amount of space when built from source? Yet when you download and install either Chrome or Chromium, they are not much bigger than 200 MB! I mean, that is a HUGE discrepancy! Do I really need to dedicate 65GB on my hard drive to a web browser (if I want to build Chromium from source)? Or is there a way to remove some unnecessary files after building?

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[Philip Rogers]

Chromium is a large project, possibly the largest public git repository, and it has many dependencies as well. Other large projects like Firefox are also in 10GB range.

To run Chromium, you only need the binary and a few extra files from out/Release (which files depends on your OS). If you don't plan on building again, you can delete everything else.

[Jonathan Garbee]

Also, do a shallow clone without history. You will save plenty of gigabytes in that alone.

[Marko J]

Is there a way to know or find out which files do I need? I'm using Windows 7 x64.

[PhistucK]

I think this file has the list -

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#chromium/src/chrome/installer/mini_installer/chrome.release&q=chrome.exe%20chrome.dll%20pak&sq=package:chromium&type=cs&l=21

☆PhistucK

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[Marko J]

Thank you. I'm going to try building Chromium on an external hard drive, and then copying only those files from that list to the internal hard drive in order to run the browser.

[Christian Biesinger]

By the way, did you build out/Release of out/Debug? The latter uses a lot more disk space (and is also slower), so in your case I'd suggest doing the former.

-Christian

On Nov 21, 2015 11:51 AM, "Marko J" <mark...@gmail.com> wrote:

So, why does Chromium take up such a huge amount of space when built from source? Yet when you download and install either Chrome or Chromium, they are not much bigger than 200 MB! I mean, that is a HUGE discrepancy! Do I really need to dedicate 65GB on my hard drive to a web browser (if I want to build Chromium from source)? Or is there a way to remove some unnecessary files after building?

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[Marko J]

I'm happy to report that I was finally able to finish the building process successfully! I did the shallow clone and built the Release version, as you have suggested, but the final "out" folder still does take up slightly more than 65GB in the end. But I guess I can live with that, since I used an external hard drive, and just installed the browser using mini_installer.

Anyway, thank you all for the advice!

P.S.: How do I update the browser? My thinking is, I have to do "gclient sync" and then build again, whereby it will only be necessary to build components that are different from the previous/current version. Is that correct?

[Christian Biesinger]

To update you need to do:

git pull --rebase
gclient sync
ninja -C out/Release

It does only build components that are different, but in practice
every few weeks the entire thing does have to be rebuilt, so that
doesn't necessarily helps much in your situation.

-Christian

[Marko J]

Ok, today I wanted to update Chromium that I built on Nov 25, but upon running "gclient sync" and then "ninja -C out\Release_x64", I got the message "no work to do". Is that expected?

[Philip Rogers]

No work to do means you didn't change any source files.

The normal way up update your checkout to tip of tree is:

git checkout origin/master

git pull origin master

gclient sync

ninja -C out/Release chrome

On Fri, Dec 4, 2015 at 3:47 PM, Marko J <mark...@gmail.com> wrote:

Ok, today I wanted to update Chromium that I built on Nov 25, but upon running "gclient sync" and then "ninja -C out\Release_x64", I got the message "no work to do". Is that expected?

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