How to Allocate Memory for Eclipse on a Mac

Increase Eclipse memory allocation when the program becomes sluggish to avoid a crash.

Start the Eclipse development environment using default memory allocation settings unless projects run slowly and start displaying memory allocation errors. Eclipse features command line options that increase program memory allocation at start up which can help resolve memory related issues. Start Eclipse from a command line and include memory allocation switches to increase program memory space and resolve errors.

Instructions

1. Close all Eclipse windows. Click the “Finder” icon located on the Mac desktop dock. Click “Applications” in the window that appears.

2. Click “Utilities,” and click “Terminal.” The command line terminal window will display.

3. Type “eclipse -vmargs –Xmx768m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m” at the command prompt and tap the “Enter” key. The “768m” parameter doubles the default memory allocation size and the “128m” doubles the default permanent generation memory size.

4. Test Eclipse and verify that memory shortage issues have been resolved. If memory allocation problems still occur, proceed to the next step.

5. Close all Eclipse windows. Type “eclipse -vmargs –Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=196m” at the command prompt and press “Enter.” Test Eclipse and verify that memory allocation issues have been resolved.

References

• Eclipse: Running Eclipse