Fixing out-of-memory in Jenkins with quality plugins

Question

What I do know is that my Jenkins tanked last night while I was installing and configuring quality plugins with an existing job. At first the job appeared to hang, then the server itself became non-responsive. The last lines from the job console were:

[INFO] Generating "Project Team" report    --- maven-project-info-reports-plugin:2.7
[INFO] Generating "Project Summary" report    --- maven-project-info-reports-plugin:2.7
[INFO] Generating "Dependencies" report    --- maven-project-info-reports-plugin:2.7
[CHECKSTYLE] Parsing file /var/lib/jenkins/jobs/fedsso-dev/workspace/target/checkstyle-result.xml
[CHECKSTYLE] Successfully parsed file /var/lib/jenkins/jobs/fedsso-dev/workspace/target/checkstyle-result.xml of module mdlive-sso with 9924 warnings.
FATAL: PermGen space
FATAL: PermGen space
Finished: null

At this point the server was out in the woods and I couldn't even stop it with server jenkins stop , having to kill -9 the process.

It looks like something ran out of memory, but I am new to getting Jenkins, Maven and plugins to play nice. The /etc/default/jenkins file does not specify a JVM heap size so I think it is using default which I believe would be 256MB, but the Jenkins process in top was running with over 2GB of virtual memory. I understand from https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Builds+failing+with+OutOfMemoryErrors that I should consider the perm size as well (which looks like it is related to "FATAL: PermGen space") and also the maven task memory.

The VM host I am running on has been set up with 7GB of memory and the machine is dedicated to Jenkins and hopefully a future install of SonarQube so I have some room to change memory settigns. Can someone help me make some sense of out the memory settings to make Jenkins and its plugins happy?

Answer 1

is your jenkins running standalone (java -jar jenkins.war) or is it deployed as web container?

if jenkins is running as standalone you simply have to add the following parameters:

java -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -Xmx5120M -jar jenkins.war this will increase your PermGem to 512m and the heap to 5120M feel free to modify the values to your needs.

But i guess this would be too simple.. i guess jenkins is running als web container. in this case you have to change the start parameters of your web server.

If you are running a Tomcat you can add CATALINA_OPTS="-Xms512m -Xmx5000m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m" to the catalina.bat / or sh if running linux.

Or if directly installed via apt-get jenkins is launched via /etc/init.d/jenkins. Take a look in that file and try to find something like

export CATALINA_OPTS="-DJENKINS_HOME=$JENKINS_BASEDIR/jenkins-home -Xmx512m -Djava.awt.headless=true"

and add the parameters there. (i'm not sure how the file looks like so i can't tell you the exact line)