Eclipse runs out of heap space on ant build

Question

ext-Myself and two co-workers have been working on a GWT project and coding in eclipse. The project is growing and we are bringing on several new developers to help out. I have been tasked with setting up their workstations before they start work. Our current systems all worked out of the box following the basic GWT set up guide (http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/usingeclipse.html)

On my working system I have not changed any of the defaults that eclipse has set for memory size.

The new system will run the simple starter projects, so I know that I have GWT set up. When I import our current code base I can run the site locally without issue. When I try and run the ant script that we have to build our project and push it out to our dev server the new system complains:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: GC overhead limit exceeded

On the new system I have modified the eclipse.ini file to and set -Xmx1024M and I have added -Xmx1024M under Window>Preferences>Java>Installed JREs neither of which have solved the problem. (shown here: http://dinu.blog.com/2010/06/02/out-of-memory/)

I have tried 32 and 64 bit versions of eclipse, and I have even tried just copying my known working eclipse folder onto the new system without any luck. Does anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

Likely you need to increase the memory for the JVM running ant (via eclipse's external tools preferences) as described here: http://soenkerohde.com/2008/06/change-eclipse-ant-settings-when-you-run-out-of-memory/

Answer 2

We have similar issues when running certain Ant scripts. You can set VM arguments for the Ant Build in the Run->External Tools->External Tools Configurations dialog. Click the JRE tab and set the usual -Xmx and -Xms params as needed.