August 23, 2007
Irrational Software Architect
I sat there staring at the first line of text in the dialog box. "JVM terminated. Exit code=1", it helpfully displayed.
All I had tried to do was start Rational Software Architect, a tool that I had been using for over a month without a hitch. Perhaps the fact that I had just allowed the latest Windows XP patch to install was a mere coincidence. Who knows? In any case, even after a reboot, RSA refused to play ball. The JVM was failing before Eclipse even displayed the RSA splash screen.
Fortunately for me, a Google search revealed that someone else had experienced a similar problem. I now realised that one of the later lines in the dialog box, the one that says -Xmx768m, was actually helpful. I added -vmargs -Xmx1028M to the properties of the RSA shortcut, tried again and this time the IDE started up successfully. I could resume coding.
Perhaps I'm being harsh, but I think that Eclipse should be resilient enough to give a more helpful error message. Or maybe programmers are generally lazier in this age of googling for solutions to problems.
Posted to Java by Keith PittyHi there,
If Eclipse/RSA gave you an error message, as a Senior Java developer you could have tried watching the memory consumption of the java program on windows TASK MANAGER and possibly infer that the program was consuming memory and suddenly stopped consuming memory.
BTW, eclipse(plain old eclipse) has had these issues from the beginning.
BR,
~A
Anjan,
Thanks for your comment. I think it's easy to suggest watching memory consumption via the Task Manager after the fact. The symptom did not lead me to immediately suspect memory consumption as the cause of the error.
My point is that this error dialog box is of the "catch all" variety. If this problem was caused by an OutOfMemoryError, it would be more helpful if Eclipse reported this to the user with a suggestion to increase the available memory via -Xmx.
Keith
Posted by: Keith at August 24, 2007 12:20 PMThank you. This is only palce where I found real and easy solution for that problem.
Posted by: Krzysztof at June 23, 2008 7:31 PM