Eclipse MAT Parsing 11GB Heap dump - Out Of Memory. Unable to parse the heap dump

Question

I was trying to parse the 11GB heap dump using Eclipse MAT and I am getting the following error

  An internal error occurred during: "Parsing heap dump" 

I think the MAT is unable to parse such a huge heap dump. I read some posts and increase the VM configurations to more than 80% of the dump size. Following are my vm configurations

      -vmargs -Xms8192m -Xmx10240m 

and I am still not able to load the dump. I tried with ParseHeapDump.bat with no changes ...

Answer 1

Keep increasing Xmx till the JVM complains, then increase your swap file size, then increase Xmx again, etc.

At that stage it will take ages because it will be using disk as RAM.

Answer 2

I recently installed Eclipse MAT (Eclipse Memory Analyzer Version 1.9.1) on Mac OS Catalina (10.15.3). I needed to review a 4g heap dump. The default JVM heap size for MAT is 1024m.

I think the easiest way to increase the JVM's heap size is to use a shell window - go to the /Applications/mat.app/Contents/Eclipse/ folder. Then vi MemoryAnalyzer.ini and change -Xmx1024m to your required value, in my case I went with -Xmx10g.

To review the change, restart MAT and go to the help -> About Eclipse Memory Analyzer then click installation details, and look for the entry: eclipse.vmargs=-Xmx10g about 50 lines down.