Re: [android-building] Building android via an external HDD cloggs up my internal HDD

[Ying Wang]

On Sun, Jan 13, 2013 at 1:42 PM, Erwin Pannecoucke <erwi...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello great community

I build android from my external HDD, over more than a year starting with gingerbread, ICS and now JB. My build machine is a laptop with the latest 64-bit ubuntu and everyting builds just fine.

However, since I started working on JB, I noticed that the free space on my laptops hdd shrinks with every build. More precise: I start with 2 Gb free space just before building, and end with about 14mb and a build error that the OTA update package can't be made (which is normal, with only 14 mb left). 

The problem is that even after a succesfull build and a reboot of my system, I don't gain any space anymore. So it must be that some things are compiled on my laptop hdd and then copied to my external hdd, but the files on my laptop aren't clean up after a succesfull build.

I've already tried to seek where those 'temporary' files could be stored, but the only folder I can discover is /temp. If I delete everything that is in there, I only free up about 150 - 200 mb. So my question to this community is: does anybody know where the other temporary files are stored, so I can delete them manually? That would be a more efficient work flow than formatting my laptop after a series of builds..

Did you put both your source tree and the out directory on the external HDD? or just use some build system variable to direct the out dir to another disk?

I don't think the build system will write to any place outside the out dir and the source tree (definitely we should only write to the out dir, but unfortunately some unspecified Android.mks still write to the source tree itself)., except /tmp.

 

Thank you very much in advance,

Erwin

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[John Vidler]

Do you have ccache set up to use your home folder for cached build files?

If so, that would account for some of the vanishing space. See if you have a .ccache folder in your home folder and have a look at this link: http://source.android.com/source/initializing.html under "setting up cached" for how to make it use a different path.

John.

On 18 Jan 2013 19:12, "Erwin Pannecoucke" <erwi...@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Ying

Thank you for your answer.

I initialized the repo on my external hdd. So the .repo folder, the source tree and the out directory are all there and there is, to my knowledge, nothing that points to my internal drive.

I'm no developer myself, so I do not have much knowledge about that, but couldn't it be that for example the java or gcc compiler make use of some temporary files during the compilation, and that those files stay on the temporary folder they use and is perhaps different from the temp/? I already tried to "analyze" my internal hdd, but the biggest folder is my home folder.

I'm sorry btw for the late respons, I thougth that I was suscribed to this toppic, but it appears that that wasn't the case.

Thank you in advance,

Erwin

Op maandag 14 januari 2013 19:47:58 UTC+1 schreef Ying Wang het volgende:

[Magnus Bäck]

On Sunday, February 24, 2013 at 16:51 EST,
Erwin Pannecoucke <erwi...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Of course, building from an external HDD comes with a serious price of
> performance.

That would depend on which interface you use to connect it to your
computer, no? I'd be surprised if a drive connected via eSATA was
slower than an internal SATA drive.

> However, I can't say exactly how much, as I 1. am building on a
> relatively old laptop and 2. I've always build from an external hdd.
> To give you an idea: building ICS or JB takes about 4 to 5 five hours.
> I'm building on an external HDD @ 7000 rpm (I think) with an HP Compaq
> 6701b
> (http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-HP-Compaq-6710b-Notebook.4457.0.html).

Presumably you're connecting the external disk via USB. I wouldn't
normally expect an internal laptop disk to outperform an external
full-size disk (I assume, since it's 7200 rpm), but maybe laptop disks
have progressed since I tried to do anything useful with them. Builds
are primarily latency-sensitive (more than throughput-sensitive) so
presumably USB adds a lot of time.

--
Magnus Bäck
ba...@google.com