Android Studio - Gradle build failing - Java Heap Space

Question

Android Studio 2.2.3. I've been building an APK for android with my current project with success until very recently. As far as I know, nothing was changed except a data file, and my "Build APK" step mysteriously started failing with this message in the gradle console:

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.
* What went wrong:
Execution failed for task ':VrSamples:Native:myproject:Projects:Android:packageDebug'.
> Java heap space

and in my "messages" window I see this error:

Error:Execution failed for task ':VrSamples:Native:myproject:Projects:Android:packageDebug'.
> Java heap space
mple, the following line, in the gradle.properties file, sets the maximum Java heap size to 1,024 MB:
<em>org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx1024m</em>
<a href="http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/build_environment.html">Read Gradle's configuration guide</a><br><a href="http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/vm/gc-ergonomics.html">Read about Java's heap size</a>

I've tried many things:

• Reset version control to previous version I know was generating APK's fine
• Re-clone the entire project in a new location to rule out and intermetiate files that might be pulled in with the .gitignore, to guarantee it's a fresh build
• Rebooted my computer
• re-installed android studio
• Run the clean step, rebuilt, manually deleted intermediate files
• Added org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx1024m to my gradle.properties file
• increased the 1024m to 4096m
• manually increased the -Xmx value in both Android Studio\bin\studio.exe.vmoptions and the 64-bit equivalent

I'm puzzled as to why I'm suddenly hitting this issue now, and why I can't seem to be able to re-create the APK's I've been building without problems until recently. As far as I'm aware, I also haven't updated any libraries either.

Would appreciate any suggestions to resolve this issue, tips on how to debug this kind of thing down the road, etc.

Answer 1

I noticed that when I open the gradle.properties folder in my Android Studios project, and hovered over any line, it gave a warning about "unused property". That put me on the path to do another google search for "Android Studio gradle.properties unused property" and I found this:

gradle.properties. Unused property

and this:

JVM arguments gradle cannot be set in gradle.properties file for Android Studio 2.1.1

The issue is that, at least for me, Windows+Android Studio seems to ignore the gradle.properties file in my project. You need to create one here: C:\Users\<username>\.gradle\gradle.properties

Then, as suggested in other threads such as the one linked to by @Kevin Tan above, I was able to increase the memory by adding a line such as this:

org.gradle.jvmargs=-XX:MaxHeapSize=256m -Xmx256m

Now I no longer hit the issue

Answer 2

Use this in gradle.properties

org.gradle.parallel=true
org.gradle.daemon=true
org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx12800M
org.gradle.configureondemand=true

Worked for me.