Tomcat does not get enough memory

Question

i'm trying to setup a jira instance on my vServer.

I've got min. 1 GB ram and max. 2 GB ram. It was runing on my friends Server with only 512 MB ram.

The first error was:

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: unable to create new native thread

I fixed this with

ulimit -u 2048

After that, the error:

Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM warning: Exception java.lang.OutOfMemoryError occurred dispatching signal SIGTERM to handler- the VM may need to

be forcibly terminated

occured.

My environment:

___ Environment _____________________________

 JIRA Build                                    : 5.0.6#733-sha1:f48fab7a0abaa0a316c14a3fc86cdf5a6805ba12
 Build Date                                    : Thu May 31 00:00:00 CEST 2012
 JIRA Installation Type                        : Standalone
 Application Server                            : Apache Tomcat/6.0.32 - Servlet API 2.5
 Java Version                                  : 1.7.0_05 - Oracle Corporation
 Current Working Directory                     : /tmp/atlassian-jira-5.0.6-standalone
 Maximum Allowable Memory                      : 742MB
 Total Memory                                  : 247MB
 Free Memory                                   : 210MB
 Used Memory                                   : 37MB

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Use the 32bit-variant of jdk. If you do not need more than 3 GB of Java-accessible RAM the 64bit will only cause needless overhead.

Answer 2

If this happens often enough, you should increase the heap size using -Xms512m -Xmx512m The default is only about 128MB, which for some systems is not enough.

You should also look to see if it is a memory leak in Jira. Does it happen on a regular interval, for example, every 4-5 days? Then you might want to look for patches to the servlet(s) and schedule occasional restarts.