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

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.

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).

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

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

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

If you are using Jenkins templates you could have additional VM settings defined in it and this might conflicting with your system VM settings

example your tempalate may have references such as these

 <mavenOpts>-Xms512m -Xmx1024m -Xss1024k -XX:MaxPermSize=1024m -Dmaven.test.failure.ignore=false</mavenOpts> 

Ensure to align these template entries with the VM setting of your system