IntelliJ uses more memory than allocated - intellij-idea

My IntelliJ goes unbearably slow, so I was fiddling with memory settings. If you select Help -> Change Memory Settings, you can set the max heap size for IntelliJ. But even after restarting, then running Mac's Activity Monitor, I see it using 5.5GB even though I set the heap to 4092MB.
It's using 1.5GB more than allocated for heap. That's a lot of memory for permgen + stack, don't you think? Or, could it be that this memory setting actually doesn't have any effect on the program?

It's the virtual memory you see, it may also include memory mapped files and many other things occupied by the JVM internals, plus the native libraries for a dozen of Apple frameworks loaded into the process. There is nothing to worry about unless you get OOM or IDE becomes slow.
If it happens, refer to the KB documents and report the issues to YouTrack with the CPU/Memory snapshots.

Related

Why does Intellij not release memory after closing a project?

I had three projects open. One of them - Spark - was very large. Upon closing spark there was NO difference in memory usage - as reported by os/x activity monitor. Note: all projects are opened within the same Intellij instance.
It is in fact using just over 4GB. And I only now have two projects open. Those two projects only take up 1.5GB if I shut down Intellij and start it up again.
So .. what to do to "encourage" Intellij to release the memory it is using? It is running very very slowly (can not keep up with my typing for example)
Update I just closed the larger of the two remaining projects. STILL no reduction in memory usage. The remaining project is a single python file. So Intellij should be using under 512Meg at this point!
Following up on #PeterGromov's answer it seems that is were difficult to obtain the memory back. In addition #KevinKrumwiede mentioned the XX:MaxHeapFreeRatio which appears to be an avenue.
Here are a couple of those ideas taken bit farther from Does GC release back memory to OS?
The HotSpot JVM does release memory back to the OS, but does so
reluctantly.
You can make it more aggressive by setting -XX:GCTimeRatio=19
-XX:MinHeapFreeRatio=20 -XX:MaxHeapFreeRatio=30 which will allow it to spend more CPU time on collecting and constrain the amount of
allocated-but-unused heap memory after a GC cycle.
Additionally with Java 9 -XX:-ShrinkHeapInSteps option can be be used
to apply the shrinking caused by the previous two options more
aggressively. Relevant OpenJDK bug.
Do note that shrinking ability and behavior depends on the chosen
garbage collector. For example G1 only gained the ability to yield
back unused chunks in the middle of the heap with jdk8u20.
So if heap shrinking is needed it should be tested for a particular
JVM version and GC configuration.
and from How to free memory in Java?
To extend upon the answer and comment by Yiannis Xanthopoulos and Hot
Licks (sorry, I cannot comment yet!), you can set VM options like this
example:
-XX:+UseG1GC -XX:MinHeapFreeRatio=15 -XX:MaxHeapFreeRatio=30 In my jdk 7 this will then release unused VM memory if more than 30% of the heap
becomes free after GC when the VM is idle. You will probably need to
tune these parameters.
While I didn't see it emphasized in the link below, note that some
garbage collectors may not obey these parameters and by default java
may pick one of these for you, should you happen to have more than one
core (hence the UseG1GC argument above).
I am going to add the -XX:MaxHeapFreeRatio to IJ and report back if it were to help.
Our application presently only runs on Java7 so the first approach above is not yet viable - but there is hope since our app is moving to jdk8 soon.
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/status-bar.html
I used this:
Shows the current heap level and memory usage. Visibility of this section in the Status bar is defined by the Show memory indicator check box in the Appearance page of the Settings/Preferences dialog. It is not shown by default.
Click the memory indicator to run the garbage collector.
The underlying Java virtual machine supports only growing of its heap. So even if after closing all projects the IDE doesn't need all of it, it's still allocated and counted as used in the OS.

How to properly assign huge heap space for JVM

Im trying to work around an issue which has been bugging me for a while. In a nutshell: on which basis should one assign a max heap space for resource-hogging application and is there a downside for tit being too large?
I have an application used to visualize huge medical datas, which can eat up to several gigabytes of memory if several imaging volumes are opened size by side. Caching the data to be viewed is essential for fluent workflow. The software is supported with windows workstations and is started with a bootloader, which assigns the heap size and launches the main application. The actual memory needed by main application is directly proportional to the data being viewed and cannot be determined by the bootloader, because it would require reading the data, which would, ultimately, consume too much time.
So, to ensure that the JVM has enough memory during launch we set up xmx as large as we dare based, by current design, on the max physical memory of the workstation. However, is there any downside to this? I've read (from a post from 2008) that it is possible for native processes to hog up excess heap space, which can lead to memory errors during runtime. Should I maybe also sniff for free virtualmemory or paging file size prior to assigning heap space? How would you deal with this situation?
Oh, and this is my first post to these forums. Nice to meet you all and be gentle! :)
Update:
Thanks for all the answers. I'm not sure if I put my words right, but my problem rose from the fact that I have zero knowledge of the hardware this software will be run on but would, nevertheless, like to assign as much heap space for the software as possible.
I came to a solution of assigning a heap of 70% of physical memory IF there is sufficient amount of virtual memory available - less otherwise.
You can have heap sizes of around 28 GB with little impact on performance esp if you have large objects. (lots of small objects can impact GC pause times)
Heap sizes of 100 GB are possible but have down sides, mostly because they can have high pause times. If you use Azul Zing, it can handle much larger heap sizes significantly more gracefully.
The main limitation is the size of your memory. If you heap exceeds that, your application and your computer will run very slower/be unusable.
A standard way around these issues with mapping software (which has to be able to map the whole world for example) is it break your images into tiles. This way you only display the image which is one the screen (or portions which are on the screen) If you need to be able to zoom in and out you might need to store data at two to four levels of scale. Using this approach you can view a map of the whole world on your phone.
Best to not set JVM max memory to greater than 60-70% of workstation memory, in some cases even lower, for two main reasons. First, what the JVM consumes on the physical machine can be 20% or more greater than heap, due to GC mechanics. Second, the representation of a particular data entity in the JVM heap may not be the only physical copy of that entity in the machine's RAM, as the OS has caches and buffers and so forth around the various IO devices from which it grabs these objects.

Netbeans out of memory exception

Netbeans out of memory exception
I increased the -Xmx value in netbeans file.
but the IDE is busy acquiring more memory to scan projects ?
the memory usage increases and the process is slow, and non responsive
Sounds like your system is thrashing. The heap size is now so large that there is not enough physical memory on your system to hold it ... and all of the other things you are running.
The end result is that your system has to copy memory pages between physical memory and the disc page file. Too much of that and the system performance will drop dramatically. You will see that the disc activity light is "on" continually. (The behaviour is worst during Java garbage collection, because that entails accessing lots of VM pages in essentially random order.)
If this is your problem then there is no easy solution:
You could reduce the -Xmx a bit ...
You could stop other applications running; e.g. quit your web browser, email client, etc.
You could buy more memory. (This only works up to a point ... if you are using a 32bit system / 32bit OS / 32bit JVM.)
You could switch to a less memory-hungry operating system or distro.

Memory graph / chart in XCode 5 during Debug

What does "Memory" usage chart/graph exactly represents in XCode 5 Debug navigator window?
I have an iOS app project with ARC disabled and no-storyboard/xib (i.e. old style). All memory management done manually using retain/release/autorelease.
When I debug the project in XCode 5, the memory pie-chart / graph show gradually increasing memory usage as the app runs, exceeds 1 GB memory footprints within half hour.
Roughly, it keeps increasing by 0.1 to 0.3 MB per 2 to 3 second with very rare memory dips/decrease (of magnitude < 0.1 MB per 30 seconds).
Is this a concern (memory leak) with respect to memory management? I did memory analysis (using Allocations/Memory Leak through Instruments on XCode 4.6) but didn't find any leaks.
Found answer myself. Unfortunately I had NSZombieEnabled (Zombie object) for debug mode - see below - (menu Product > Scheme > Edit Scheme)
Typically NSZombieEnabled tool keeps even the released objects in memory to help developer find over released objects. Refer this link - What is NSZombie?
After I unchecked "Enable Zombie Objects" option, the memory usage stabilized to about 10 mb (not always increasing) even after half hour app usage - see below -
BOTTOM LINE - Ensure to clear "Enable Zombie Objects" when you want to analyze memory usage.
It simply measures the memory your app uses. So if it is increasing it must be a memory leak.
When using the leak analysis tools, I would use it as a guideline. It may help you find leaks but with all automated tools it may not find it all. As certain pieces of code (Especially the more dynamic pieces) may be hard to predict what they do memory wise for an automated tool.
I am seeing an issue where memory (heap) grows indefinitely on heavy processing but when running the exact same binary without Xcode; memory usage is fine. Remember to test outside of Xcode -- no idea what the cause is. NSZombies and all other debug options are off.

Heap profiling on ARM

I am developing a GUI-heavy C++ application on a Freescale MX51-based board Linux 2.6.35. I would like to perform heap profiling.
Unfortunately, all heap profiling tools I have found have either been too intrusive or ostensibly non-working on ARM. Specific tools I've tried:
Valgrind Massif: unworkable on my platform due to the platform's feeble CPU. The 80% CPU time overhead introduced by Massif causes a range of problems in my application that cannot be compensated for.
gperftools (formerly Google Performance Tools) tcmalloc: All features of this rather un-intrusive, library-based libc malloc() replacement work on my target except for the heap profiler. To rephrase, the thread caching allocator works but the profiler does not. I'll explain the failure mode of the profiler below for anyone curious.
Can anyone suggest a set of replacement tools for performing C++ heap profiling on ARM platforms? Ideal output would ultimately be a directed allocation graph, similar to what gperftools' tcmalloc outputs. Low resource utilization is a must- my platform is highly resource constrained.
Failure mode of gperftools' tcmalloc explained:
I'm providing this information only for those that are curious; I do not expect a response. I'm seeing something similar to gperftools' issue #407 below, except on ARM rather than x86.
Specifically, I always get the message "Hooked allocator frame not found, returning empty trace." I spent some time debugging the issue and it appears that, when dynamically linking the tcmalloc library, frame pointers at the boundary between my application and the dynamic library are null- the stack cannot be walked "above" the call into the dynamic library.
gperftools issue #407: https://github.com/gperftools/gperftools/issues/410
stackoverflow user seeing similar problems on ARM: Missing frames on shared libraries on ARM
Heaps. Many ways to do them, but I've only run across 3 main types that matter in embedded land:
Linked list heaps. Each alloc is tracked in a "used" list. Once freed, they are dropped into a "free" list. On freeing, adjacent blocks of free memory are "joined" into larger pieces. Allocs can be any size. Each alloc and free is a O(N) op as it has to traverse the free list to give you a piece of memory plus break the free block into a size close to what you asked for while leaving the remaining block in the free list. Because of the increasing overhead per alloc, this system cannot be used by itself on smaller systems. This also tends to cause memory fragmentation over time if steps aren't taken to minimize it.
Fixed size (unit) heaps. You break your heap into equal size (smaller) parts. This wastes memory a bit, depending on how big the chunks are (and how many different sized, fixed allocator heaps you create), but alloc and free are both O(1) time operations. No searching, no joining. This style is often combined with the first one for "small object allocations" as the engines I've worked with have 95% of their allocations below a set size (say 256 bytes). This way, you use the unit heap for small allocs for huge speed and only minimal memory loss, while using the list heap for larger allocs. No external fragmentation of memory either.
Relocatable memory heaps. You don't give out pointers to memory, but handles. That way, behind the scenes, you can change memory pointers when needed to remove fragmentation or whatever. High overhead. High pain the the #$$ quotient as it's easy to abuse and get dangling pointer all over. Also added overhead for each memory dereference. But wanted to mention it.
There's some basic patterns. You can find all sorts of libs out in the wild that use them and also have built in statistics for number of allocs, fragmentation, and other useful stats. It's also not the hard to roll your own really, though I'd not recommend it for anything outside of satisfying curiosity as debugging without a working malloc is painful indeed. Adding thread support is pretty straightforward as well, but again, downloading a ready made solution is the better choice.
The above info applies to all platforms, ARM or otherwise, though most of my experience has been on low level ARM stuff so the above info is battle tested for your platform. Hope this helps!