Quarkus native executable build: high memory consumption

Question

I'm building a Quarkus native executable with a multi-stage Docker build as described in Quarkus - Building a Native Executable

My project just includes the Hello World-Example with some added ORM-functionality (so not really a lot of dependencies). The build works fine, but my problem is, that it consumes a lot of memory during build time. That means up to 6 GiB. Build time is also very long in my opinion (~4-6 minutes in total).

The problem starts when I'm building on our CI/CD-infrastructure. We don't have that much memory there and so the build fails with Error: Image build request failed with exit status 137.

Am I doing something wrong or is this just the normal behaviour? Is there a possibility to reduce at least the memory consumption?

Answer 1

Thanks to Ken and Luca Burgazzoli! So, it is normal for GraalVM to use >4GiB of RAM and to take more than 3 minutes.

One can limit memory consumption by specifiying -J-Xmx2G as an additionalBuildArgs-param for the quarkus-maven-plugin. But this may increase build time.

Answer 2

@ben answer is correct but maybe it is useful to be more precise. You have to edit the pom.xml in the getting-started dir and edit the native profile and adding <additionalBuildArgs>-J-Xmx2G</additionalBuildArgs> like this:

  <profile>
        <id>native</id>
        <activation>
            <property>
                <name>native</name>
            </property>
        </activation>
        <build>
            <plugins>
                <plugin>
                    <groupId>io.quarkus</groupId>
                    <artifactId>quarkus-maven-plugin</artifactId>
                    <version>${quarkus.version}</version>
                    <executions>
                        <execution>
                            <goals>
                                <goal>native-image</goal>
                            </goals>
                            <configuration>
                                <enableHttpUrlHandler>true</enableHttpUrlHandler>
                <additionalBuildArgs>-J-Xmx2G</additionalBuildArgs>
                            </configuration>
                        </execution>
                    </executions>
                </plugin>
                <plugin>
                    <artifactId>maven-failsafe-plugin</artifactId>
                     ...
                </plugin>
            </plugins>
        </build>
    </profile>