Out Of Memory Errors During The OSB Build

OEPE builds take a long time and sometimes, for large domains, fail with OutOfMemory errors.

Turns out this is not a heap OOM, but a PermGen space one.

[java] Exporting to /srvrs/esb_tp/build/output/paypal2/paypal2-sbconfig-140122-212239.jar...
[java] Exception in thread "Worker-4"
[java] Exception: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError thrown from the UncaughtExceptionHandler in thread "Worker-4"
[java] Exception in thread "Worker-1"
[java] Exception: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError thrown from the UncaughtExceptionHandler in thread "Worker-1"

The setup is complicated by the fact that the launcher started from build.xml is not the JVM that actually does the build; launcher launches (duh) OEPE for this task, and so setting parameters to Ant’s java task does not help.

At first I failed to find a correct set of parameters to pass to build, and resorted to hacks. I have renamed java binary under JRE into java.native, and created a shell file named “java” instead:

#!/bin/bash
exec /builds/jdk1.7/jre/bin/java.native -XX:MaxPermGen=1024m $*

which worked remarkably well - not only OOMs were gone, but the build time reduced from 8 minutes to 4.

The solution is somewhat unsatisfactory though, and later our release management team offered a better option: put the following lines into the build.xml script:

<jvmarg value="-Xms512m"></jvmarg>;
<jvmarg value="-Xmx1024m"></jvmarg>;
<jvmarg value="-XX:PermSize=128m"></jvmarg>;
<jvmarg value="-XX:MaxPermSize=512m"></jvmarg>;

For the record, the complete build step now looks like this:

<java fork="true" failonerror="true" maxmemory="2000m" jar="${oepe.home}/plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.2.0.v20110502.jar" classpathref="library.osb" dir="${oepe.home}">
  <arg line="-data ${workspace.dir}"></arg>
  <arg line="-application com.bea.alsb.core.ConfigExport"></arg>
  <arg line="-configProject ${config.project}"></arg>
  <arg line="-configJar ${output.dir}/${profilename}-${config.jar.name}-${label}.jar"></arg>
  <arg line="-includeDependencies true"></arg>
  <arg line="-configuration ${output.dir}"></arg>
  <sysproperty value="${weblogic.home}" key="weblogic.home"></sysproperty>
  <sysproperty value="${alsb.home}" key="osb.home"></sysproperty>
  <sysproperty value="true" key="com.bea.plateng.common.util.logging.useJDKlogger"></sysproperty>
  <sysproperty value="1000" key="osgi.bundlefile.limit"></sysproperty>
  <sysproperty value="${alsb.home}/harvester" key="harvester.home"></sysproperty>
  <sysproperty value="en_US" key="osgi.nl"></sysproperty>
  <sysproperty value="true" key="sun.lang.ClassLoader.allowArraySyntax"></sysproperty>
  <sysproperty value="${bea.home}" key="middleware.home"></sysproperty>
  <sysproperty value="/srvrs/esb_tp/tmp" key="java.io.tmpdir"></sysproperty>
  <jvmarg value="-Xms512m"></jvmarg>
  <jvmarg value="-Xmx1024m"></jvmarg>
  <jvmarg value="-XX:PermSize=128m"></jvmarg>
  <jvmarg value="-XX:MaxPermSize=512m"></jvmarg>
</java>

Note that output directory and its sibling p2/ directory are removed before the build, but in our setup it is done by the *.sh file. You may want to do it too.