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Eclipse: Galileo to Helios upgrade error message - Failed to create the Java Virtual Machine

Submitted by Druss on Tue, 2010-11-02 00:11

I just finished upgrading Eclipse from Galileo to the new Helios release. I performed the upgrade by adding Helios to the software sources list and updating and all seemed to go well. However, when I restarted Eclipse, I got a splash image which indicated that the upgrade had gone through and then ran into the following error message:
Failed to create the Java Virtual Machine

After much hee-ing and haw-ing, I decided to see if I could get more information on this by running Eclipse from the command-line. Off I went to the Eclipse install directory via the CLI. eclipse.exe gave me the same error as before. However, running eclipsec.exe failed with the following message:
"Error occurred during initialization of VM / could not reserve enough space for object heap"

This triggered a tiny spark of incandescence in the bulb that resides in my head, as I remembered that I had previously increased the maximum heap size available to Eclipse by editing the eclipse.ini file. I had increased the size to 768MB. To reset this setting, I opened eclipse.ini in an editor and changed "
-Xmx768m" back to its original "-Xmx256m". Running eclipse.exe now brought up my workspace and all seems to be well. While setting the heap size back to 768MB once again causes Eclipse to fail loading, I'm currently satisfied with a middle-ground compromise of 512MB.

Odd that it would work with Galileo and not with Helios.

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