Workarounds for building Android 10 on 8GB RAM

8GB_android-10_compilation-note

Workarounds for building Q on 8GB RAM environment:

1. At the start of the build:
[ 99% 138/139] /mnt/ssd/aosip/out/soong/.bootstrap/bin/soong_build /mnt/ssd/aosip/out/soong/build.ninja
This used to take around 30mins, after enabling zram now it takes around 30secs (thanks to @kdrag0n for the zram idea) which is on par with what happens in 16GB RAM building environments

sudo apt install zram-config for installing zram-config package
sudo nano /etc/fstab and add a # in front of the swap disk if you have one and then reboot
After booting cat /proc/swaps to check if zram is enabled or not

2. To avoid huge metalava compilation times, compile the api-stubs-docs and other packages manually first then continue with mka bacon etc

For example this is what I'm using now in aosip:
. build/envsetup.sh && lunch aosip_wayne-userdebug && mka api-stubs-docs && mka hiddenapi-lists-docs && mka system-api-stubs-docs && mka test-api-stubs-docs && mka kronic

Each of those api-stubs-docs, hiddenapi-lists-docs etc took around 4-7 mins
Increasing of heap from soong directory or other env exports are not required

Total combined build time in my system (Ryzen 1600 with a 8gb ddr4 stick) is around 2hrs now compared to 5hrs previously

For errors while building metalava check #metalava

Any ideas how I can run the AOSP Build with 6GB ?
On my system (Ryzen 3 3300u) 2.1GB is occupied by the GPU and there is no BIOS option to reduce it :(
I read somewhere that we can disable the documentation build altogether..

Btw,
I also saw this suggestion to improve compile times..
https://cpiekarski.com/2013/01/02/speeding-up-aosp-builds/

Buy more RAM 🤷‍♂️

I have found a few possibilities actually:

https://groups.google.com/g/android-building/c/5G2l5JR3jWE