Sunday, February 14, 2010

Compiling Release Build in Flex - non-alerted memory error:

I use Eclipse with FB3 plug-in for all my development, and often can become the case with opportunistic applications, Eclipse will grab more and more memory.  If I'm working on 2-3 apps at once, compiling and changing objects, I quickly lose up to 500MB to Eclipse.  Garbage collection and heap status size are determined by the .ini file.  When working on projects that have to embed a couple of fonts, I've had to increase the size, so that the compiler doesn't give me an out of memory error and ask me to close my workbench.

Well, to keep Eclipse from becoming a memory hog, I changed the runtime and max perm size to 128 respectively.  This normally keeps Eclipse happy, running pretty quickly, and about as close to 300MB at runtime as I can keep it.  Well, recently while building out a project, I tried to export my final build, and the application kept crashing or bombing out.  The problem was that it wasn't telling me what was going on.  It just kept stopping, and not giving me a reason why.  I knew something was wrong because the release-bin folder remained empty.

Switching over to Eclipse's plug-in development, I checked the error logs (very, very important resource when Flex and Eclipse fail without giving you warning…).  The error:
java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
.
.
.
Caused by: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
Root exception:
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space

Aha! Eureka - my answer lay in the fact that I had changed my workbench max and permanent size to something smaller than it could use, but it wouldn't tell me that.  Why Eclipse, is there now message?  Well, glad I know how to find the error log in Eclipse.

Hope this helps anyone else who's Release Build fails, and no answer/reason is given…

1 comment:

  1. Same thing happened to me and I thought of looking around and seeing if anyone else was running into the "Phantom Error". I'm planning on posting pretty much the same kind of article

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