GC overhead limit exceeded when building android source

Question

****[ 35% 11837/33004] build out/target/common/obj/JAVA_LIBRARIES/sdk_v21_intermediates/classes.jack 

FAILED:/bin/bash -c 
\"
(mkdir -p out/target/common/obj/         


        

Answer 1

Google recommends minimum 16GB of RAM for building source code and we have experienced that with Android N it is indeed mandatory.

Unless 16 GB of RAM is given to machine, reliability of source code build is really really low. You may try multiple configurations of jack-server and parameters but none of them may prove to be a reliable.

This is running thread of similar problems faced by many :- https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=194027

I hope this helps !

Answer 2

Seems like a bug in Android makefiles - 3500 megabytes is really not enough to build some Java packages inside Android. It's hardcoded value, you can find it in build/core/config.mk. For now you can simply increase it locally (however it's weird that it isn't placed in some environment variable).

I've increased it to 5500 megabytes and it works like a charm.