Rebecca’s Ramblings

I’ve finally worked out why Eclipse has been crashing with out-of-memory errors all the time since I upgraded to Ubuntu Feisty.

Before this release, I was using a version of Eclipse I had installed manually. This time, I’m using the version packaged by Ubuntu.

The application launcher provided by Ubuntu calls /usr/bin/eclipse, which is a shell script wrapping the call to /usr/lib/eclipse/eclipse (which is what actually launches Eclipse). This wrapper adds some -vmargs to the call, which means that Eclipse ignores any -vmargs you’ve specifed in your eclipse.ini file… such as the ones to increase the Java heap size so as to stop Eclipse crashing with out-of-memory errors if you’re working on a large project.

Simple solution - change the launcher to call /usr/lib/eclipse/eclipse instead of /usr/bin/eclipse.

More complicated solution available in this Ubuntu bug report.