How to give Jenkins more heap space when it´s started as a service?

Question

I want to increase the available heap space for Jenkins. But as it is installed as a service I don´t know how to do it.

Botel

See also #14762662 – Brunei

Answer 1

In your Jenkins installation directory there is a jenkins.xml, where you can set various options. Add the parameter -Xmx with the size you want to the arguments-tag (or increase the size if its already there).

Sauterne

see also #14762662 – Yamashita

my question is : if the builds is running out of memory , why we should set the java options in the master ? – Monoatomic

You shouldn't. But this question was not about builds running out of memory, it was about master running out of memory. – Sauterne

As of Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS, there's no such file. The /etc/default/jenkins solution offered below by Steve is the one that works for me. – Rosamariarosamond

So if the build step of a jenkins job is failing with this error, then java opts should be set for the jenkins SLAVE, right? – Dorm

Answer 2

If you used Aptitude (apt-get) to install Jenkins on Ubuntu 12.04, uncomment the JAVA_ARGS line in the top few lines of /etc/default/jenkins:

# arguments to pass to java
#JAVA_ARGS="-Xmx256m"   # <--default value
JAVA_ARGS="-Xmx2048m"
#JAVA_ARGS="-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true" # make jenkins listen on IPv4 address

Dumbbell

what if it's windows? – Lest

Question specifically states Windows. – Piemonte

Yeah, I wrote this answer before I knew what I was doing on SO, and I'm surprised that it's gotten so many upvotes. Perhaps, like me, a lot of people find their way to this question through a search engine, and a larger percentage of those people are using Linux or Unix? I don't understand it. – Dumbbell

"Perhaps, like me, a lot of people find their way to this question through a search engine, and a larger percentage of those people are using Linux or Unix? I don't understand it." That's exactly how I found it. – Colombia

Don't forget restart jenkins service sudo service jenkins stop sudo service jenkins start – Traceytrachea

We should edit the question to include linux servers, as the majority of servers run some form of linux OS, and not windows, and since this answer has the most up votes. – Maharajah

/etc/sysconfig/jenkins for centos 7 – Similar

Warning! After Jenkins 2.332.1 the /etc/default/jenkins config file is ignored: #71494731 – Daph

Answer 3

You need to modify the jenkins.xml file. Specifically you need to change

   <arguments>-Xrs -Xmx256m 
    -Dhudson.lifecycle=hudson.lifecycle.WindowsServiceLifecycle 
    -jar "%BASE%\jenkins.war" --httpPort=8080</arguments>

to

    <arguments>-Xrs -Xmx2048m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m 
    -Dhudson.lifecycle=hudson.lifecycle.WindowsServiceLifecycle 
    -jar "%BASE%\jenkins.war" --httpPort=8080</arguments>

You can also verify the Java options that Jenkins is using by installing the Jenkins monitor plugin via Manage Jenkins / Manage Plugins and then navigating to Managing Jenkins / Monitoring of Hudson / Jenkins master to use monitoring to determine how much memory is available to Jenkins.

If you are getting an out of memory error when Jenkins calls Maven, it may be necessary to set MAVEN_OPTS via Manage Jenkins / Configure System e.g. if you are running on a version of Java prior to JDK 1.8 (the values are suggestions):

-Xmx2048m  -XX:MaxPermSize=512m

If you are using JDK 1.8:

-Xmx2048m

Brunei

when i try setting the JENKINS_JAVA_OPTIONS as described above i get: "Starting Jenkins Unrecognized option: --XX:MaxPermSize=512m" – Sovereignty

There should be only one hyphen: -XX:MaxPermSize=512m - the above response has been edited to fix this typo. – Piccadilly

Any idea how to set JENKINS_JAVA_OPTIONS in Windows? – Saltillo

On Windows, according to jenkins.361315.n4.nabble.com/… you use Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Environment Variables – Brunei

-XX:MaxPermSize is no longer used with Java 8 or higher https://mcmap.net/q/99192/-what-does-xx-maxpermsize-do – Euchology

Answer 4

I've added to /etc/sysconfig/jenkins (CentOS):

# Options to pass to java when running Jenkins.
#
JENKINS_JAVA_OPTIONS="-Djava.awt.headless=true -Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m"

For ubuntu the same config should be located in /etc/default

Tymothy

Answer 5

From the Jenkins wiki:

The JVM launch parameters of these Windows services are controlled by an XML file jenkins.xml and jenkins-slave.xml respectively. These files can be found in $JENKINS_HOME and in the slave root directory respectively, after you've install them as Windows services.

The file format should be self-explanatory. Tweak the arguments for example to give JVM a bigger memory.

https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Installing+Jenkins+as+a+Windows+service

Pomiculture