JVM Memory Error?

Report · Jul 23, 2009

Hi,

A few of our clients have started getting errors over the past few days that stop them from starting the ColdFusion service.

The errors are:

Error occurred during initialization of VM. Could not reserve enough space for object heap.
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError

So far the only way we have found to resolve this is to edit the jvm.config and drop the memory down from our usual setting (1024) to 768. I'm not sure where this error is coming from as these servers have 4gb minimum RAM, and all had plenty of available RAM.
If it changes anything, so far only cf7 sites have been affected. These sites have been running comfortably on 1024 for many months.

Does anyone have any ideas?
Thanks in advance.

Report · Jul 24, 2009

Hi:

I have seen this happen on servers where the OS Swap file space was limited. The Java VM was not able to allocate enough space because there was litterally no more space to provide. If that is the case it is a symptom of a much bigger problem and you may need to move resources to other drives.

To solve the problem in the short term I added another drive I had available and mounted the swap file to it and manually specified the size to be at least three times the amount of ram in the system. That bought me the time to find out what applications were using up the drive space and causing the problem. Unfortunately it does require a reboot of the server.

Solved the problem and also provides a speed bonus as the Swap file is on a drive that runs on it's own controller and does not have to compete for access time. (A small bonus but hey ya gotta look for the silver lining.)

Hope that helps.

-Joe