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Eclipse 3.3 running out of memory

2007-07-15
2013-03-15
  • Arve Knudsen

    Arve Knudsen - 2007-07-15

    I've just started using Eclipse/PyDev (coming from a Vim background, it's well .. different), and so far I like it but I am having some serious problems. I don't know if this is caused by PyDev or if it is a general Eclipse problem, but Eclipse will consistently slow down noticeably and eventually run out of memory (I get an error dialog saying something like "Java heap space"). This is happening so frequently I can't work as effectively as I should. I would greatly appreciate any help in resolving this issue.

    I am working on Ubuntu Feisty, using Eclipse 3.3.0 with the latest updates, PyDev 1.3.7 and Sun Java 1.6.0 (b105).

     
    • Steve Lianoglou

      Steve Lianoglou - 2007-07-15

      Hi Arve,

      Honestly I rarely (can't remember the last time, really) get an out of memory error w/ Eclips (what are you doing!? :-)

      (I also haven't been using the Eclipse/PyDev combo much lately, but anyway)

      Anyway, if you need more memory, you should be able to tweak that through the "eclipse.ini" file. I don't know where this would be on linux (sorry, don't have it installed here), but it's buried within the application's folder on my mac (/Applications/eclipse/Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/eclipse.ini to be precise)

      You'll see -Xms and -Xmx (min/max memory for java, respectfully) which you can change.

      Hope that helps,
      -steve

       
    • Arve Knudsen

      Arve Knudsen - 2007-07-16

      Thanks. I'm not really doing anything special, just have a few Python modules open at the same time. This seems to happen when PyDev tries to autocomplete attributes where I can typically notice appreciable delay, and then sometimes Eclipse will crash. Eclipse also reports quite a few exceptions, on the command line, during operation that seem to originate from within PyDev.

       
      • Fabio Zadrozny

        Fabio Zadrozny - 2007-07-16

        I've had some complains about java 1.6... can you give 1.5 a shot to see if it works well for you? (in my projects I've about 10.000 files in the workspace and usually about 10-12 open and Eclipse is using 251mb after 3 hours open, so, if you're having out-of-memory errors with less than that and the same memory, there's probably something wrong...)

        Also, can you paste those exceptions?

        Cheers,

        Fabio

         
    • Arve Knudsen

      Arve Knudsen - 2007-07-16

      Fabio: I've installed 1.5 now, we'll see if I try it out later. In the meantime I've upped Eclipse's memory limit to 768MB, we'll see if that stops it from crashing. Can a high number of errors detected by PyDev's code analysis be a reason for high memory usage (currently it reports 2801 items)?

      I'll try and save those exceptions for you when they occur in the future. I've btw. pasted the traceback from the last Eclipse crash at http://rafb.net/p/Sm3WhW20.html, if it's of interest to you.

      Arve

       
      • Fabio Zadrozny

        Fabio Zadrozny - 2007-07-16

        Nice traceback ;-)

        Seems like a bug to me... apparently it's getting into recursion for some reason when trying to make your python file parsable...

        Can you report that as a bug? I'll try to make it available for the next release (which should be later this week).

        Cheers,

        Fabio

        p.s. the high number of errors shouldn't affect this (Eclipse manages those pretty well).

         
        • Arve Knudsen

          Arve Knudsen - 2007-07-16

          Bug reported.

           
    • Arve Knudsen

      Arve Knudsen - 2007-07-16

      I've had some more exception tracebacks printed to the console and it seems they are ultimately caused by out-of-memory conditions, it turns out I'd adjusted the memory usage of the Ubuntu-installed Eclipse (v3.2) and not version 3.3 which I've installed now. After having turned on heap size display in Eclipse, I found that the upper limit on heap size was no more than 64MB. I've managed to increase the maximum heap size for Eclipse 3.3 and hopefully this will help. One would think I am not the only one running into problems with the default heap size maximum?

       
      • Fabio Zadrozny

        Fabio Zadrozny - 2007-07-19

        The strange thing is that in the default windows install it has 256mb already set (and not only 64mb)...