Eclipse “Out of Memory Error” and “GC overhead limit exceeded”

Syntax Error -  Folded Up Beyond All Recognition
If you happen to have Eclipse not responding anymore sometimes, the reason could be that you sit on a 64bit machine where eclipse needs more memory. Be sure to have (at least) the following configurations in your eclipse.ini (I even use bigger values for the PermSizes):

-Xms512m
-Xmx1024m
-XX:PermSize=64m
-XX:MaxPermSize=128m

Creative Commons License photo credit: Simon Pow
, Posted Tuesday, October 12th, 2010 under Programming.

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30 comments

  1. dlumberg says:

    I had this problem with eclipse-php and using Drupal 6. It took me a while to realize that eclipse was trying to load all of the old aggregated JS files into memory before throwing an error. Once I emptied out sites/default/files/js and rebuilt the workspace everything ran smoothly.

  2. Fixed my issue on Windows 7 64bit. Nice advice – saved me a big headache thanks.

  3. Szymon says:

    Thanks for advice, it really helped me.

  4. I’d also like to leave my thanks. This fixed my problems.

  5. thanks a lot. It’s helpful to me..

  6. Nice, Fixed my problem too.
    So why eclipse development and packaging team has not thought of this?

  7. Got no idea. A lot of people seem to have this problem.

  8. WildStyle says:

    Man… this saved my day, thanks a lot!

    I’d installed Java updates and all sorts trying to figure this one out and then discovered this post… cheers! ;)

    //WildStyle

  9. This little issue was driving me crazy. Thanks!, this did help me a lot.

  10. Manpreet says:

    Yipee :) its working now

  11. It’s work !!!
    Thank you very much!

  12. I was seeing errors cropping up after installing modeling tools, generally when trying to add new components to the environment. Wasn’t so much of an issue with Helios, but is noticeably worse in Indigo. Thanks for the info!

  13. ***

    – Optimisation de la mémoire de la JVM pour Eclipse

    ***

    Par défaut, Eclipse est tout à fait adapter pour des projets « standard » de taille moyenne et qui ne demandent pas beaucoup de dépendances complexes.
    Par contre dès qu’il s’agit de développer dans un environnement plus complexe avec plusieurs Frameworks et plugins, cela peut facilement tourner au drame et avoir quelques erreurs dues à l’insuffisance de mémoire notamment dans la zone mémoire « permGen space », comme « Eclipse need more memory… Do you want to exit the workbench now ? » ou « OutOfMemoryException« . Ce genre d’erreur est assez répétitif et nous fait perdre beaucoup de temps.

    Alors pour remédier à tout cela, la solution est de passer des paramètres au lancement de Eclipse. Ces paramètres dépendent de la configuration de notre machine.
    ===>plus détails : http://learninformatique.blogspot.com

  14. Thank you, good tip, worked well.

  15. Thanks! Get finaly rid of my eclipse problems.

  16. Anake says:

    Thanks a lot, I look at this post every time I install eclipse.
    I was wondering if you could update the post to say what each of those values (e.g. Xms) mean, so I could adjust accordingly.
    For the first time today the minimum values you gave haven’t been enough, and don’t know which to change!
    Thanks again

  17. Just double the numbers until it works. ;-)

  18. e.beyer says:

    Awesome. Thanks a bunch!

  19. Prakash says:

    Thanks…………….
    Solve My Problem but Still Showing X mark on Project

  20. Den Gordo says:

    Thanks mate! It saved my day with Eclipse Classic (Jungo).

  21. Thanks a lot! It’s ok with Eclipse Indigo

  22. vinod kakumani says:

    Thank You brother!

  23. Sanriomi Sintaro says:

    Thank’s alot..^^

    really save my day~

  24. Saurav D says:

    Eclipse Kepler 2 with Spring Tool Suite (STS ) plugin was performing horribly.

    This fixed it:
    -Xms512m
    -Xmx1024m
    -XX:PermSize=128m
    -XX:MaxPermSize=256m

    Thanks!
    (Yes I need to up the permsize after what I tried your configs but still didn’t help, and followed the suggestion from here: http://www.coreservlets.com/Apache-Tomcat-Tutorial/eclipse-jdk1.6.0_21-permgen-bug.html)

  25. Thanks a lot ,its working

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