Re: "Error occurred during initialization of VM" Error Message

From:

Nigel Wade <nmw@ion.le.ac.uk>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 09:48:44 +0100

Message-ID:

<fsvh9c$il7$1@south.jnrs.ja.net>

Hugo wrote:

On Apr 1, 11:19 am, "Steve W. Jackson" <stevewjack...@knology.net>
wrote:

In article
<71d45ce6-2318-4b0d-8239-ae9f4ed5b...@b5g2000pri.googlegroups.com>,

Hugo <hari...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi:

I am receiving the following error message when I shutdown Tomcat:

"Error occurred during initialization of VM
Could not reserve enough space for object heap"

The server has 4GB of RAM and the Tomcat has been set to claim upto
2GB of memory.

Any clues on why this message is being received?

The amount of RAM the server has isn't relevant, it's the amount you try
to allocate to the JVM's heap. You don't say what platform, but Java
can't get a full 2GB on most platforms. On Windows, it's something in
the area of 1600 MB or thereabouts.
--
Steve W. Jackson
Montgomery, Alabama

Hi:

I am using a Sun V240 with Solaris 9.0 as the operating system.

Is there a spec document on Sun's website which shows the maximum
memory Java can claim on various OS? I could not find the data via
Googling.

It won't be on the Sun Java site, it's an OS feature not a JVM feature. If it's
32bit Solaris I don't know what the maximum vm is that you can allocate to a
process, probably 4GB.

Besides the overriding OS limitation, there are also limits set by your system
administrator. These are defined by ulimit. You may need to modify ulimit for
the Tomcat process to allow it to allocate more virtual memory space. You can
test it from the command line by running:
$ java -Xmx2G -version
it will fail until you set the correct ulimit value.

E.g. on my system:
$ ulimit -S -v 2000000
$ java -Xmx2G -version
Error occurred during initialization of VM
Could not reserve enough space for object heap
Could not create the Java virtual machine.

$ ulimit -S -v 3000000
$ java -Xmx2G -version
java version "1.6.0_01"
....

To increase your ulimit above the hard limit you will need root access.

--
Nigel Wade