Sunday, March 26, 2006

Swapping Hell: Compiling JDK 1.5 on Freebsd 4.x

In the past few days I was playing with some AJAX + Java codes. As I plan to deploy it to my web site later, I thought it would be a good idea to upgrade the JDK (from 1.3.x to 1.5.x) on the web server. As expected, my antique web server (K6 400MHz with 192MB RAM) took forever to compile the FreeBSD port. After several hours of hard disk crunching, the build process stopped as there was not enough swap space... yuck! The swap partition on the machine is only 128MB. So I used vn to add another 500MB of temporary swap file.

And after 14 hours, 49 minutes and 45.95 seconds later, it finally completed the compilation :P

1 comment:

Alvin said...

Yeah... I had the same problem while compiling JDK 1.X on FreeBSD 6.0. Ran out of swap over and over again, until I finally gave up.

So maybe now I can try adding a temp swap of a few Gs just to see it compiles. 8P