YUI Compressor in low memory environment

Question

Is there a way to reduce the memory required by the YUI compressor or is there another compressor able to run via command line in "low" memory environments?

My hosting provider has limits on the amount of memory and virtual memory I can use from the shell. Currently it looks like: ulimit -m 200000 -v 200000. The -v argument is the one that seem to have a real effect. I get one of the following two results when trying to run the YUI Compressor in this environment:

Error occurred during initialization of VM
Could not reserve enough space for object heap
Could not create the Java virtual machine.

or

Exception java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: requested 32756 bytes for ChunkPool::allocate. Out of swap space?

The difference is due to using the JVM arguments -Xms18m -Xmx18m for the second one. I can duplicate this effect on my local linux box with the following:

( ulimit -v 200000; java -Xmx18m -jar yui-compressor-2.4.2.jar -o foo-min.css foo.css )

I'm looking to build both javascript and the css on the hosting provider immediately after an update of the source code to push to the live site.

Answer 1

I was able to get the YUI Compressor to execute in the restricted memory space by using the Small Footprint Runtime Environment from Sun.

$ java -version
java version "1.5.0_10-eval"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition for Embedded (build 1.5.0_10-eval-b02, headless)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_10-eval-b02, mixed mode)
Evaluation version, 90 days remain in evaluation period

Only problem I see is that it's an evaluation version but with this version I didn't have to monkey around with -Xmx or -XX:MaxPermPool options whatsoever.