6 Things to Know About RAM for AOSP Builds

16GB is the minimum for AOSP builds 8GB is so painful that comparing build times between the two is almost meaningless.

8GB causes immediate swapping With an 8-core CPU, each parallel job can use 1–2GB of RAM. On 8GB, the OS starts swapping almost immediately.

Swapping turns builds into a crawl Once swapping starts, your build becomes disk-bound and can take hours to finish a clean build.

More RAM does not cut build time in half Moving from 8GB to 16GB won’t halve your build time, but 8GB is unusable for practical work.

Parallel jobs demand memory AOSP builds are massively parallel, and each job needs its own memory allocation to run efficiently.

16GB is the floor, not the ideal You may still benefit from more RAM, but 16GB is where builds become tolerable.