Is it true that eclipse can consume 900's of thousands kB of virtual memory?

[Fikrul Arif]

I've 1 GB of RAM and often get eclipse killed for out-of-memory. dmesg said:
    Killed process 2012 (eclipse) total-vm:982480kB, anon-rss:241176kB, file-rss:1112kB
Does eclipse really need 982480kB RAM or is it a bug? Besides eclipse-platform, I also installed Eclipse ADT plugin and Subclipse.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: eclipse (not installed)
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-16.29-generic 3.0.20
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-16-generic i686
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu4
Architecture: i386
Date: Tue Apr 3 16:25:13 2012
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Release i386 (20110427.1)
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: eclipse
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2012-03-04 (30 days ago)
modified.conffile..etc.eclipse.ini: [modified]
mtime.conffile..etc.eclipse.ini: 2012-04-02T20:12:01.760716

[Fikrul Arif (fikr4n)]

I'm sorry it ought to be eclipse-platform, but I don't know how to update my report.

[Niels Thykier (niels-thykier)]

Hi,

I very much doubt that eclipse (itself) is using 900 MB of memory. From your logs (with manual re-alignment):

[ 5682.395679] [ pid ] uid tgid total_vm rss cpu oom_adj oom_score_adj name
[ 5682.383742] [ 1996] 1000 1996 245620 60334 0 0 0 eclipse
[...]
[ 5682.396532] [ 2012] 1000 1996 245620 60572 0 0 0 eclipse

The "total_vm" appears to be ~239.86 MB and not the ~959.45MB your log claims in the bottom. More likely, the kernel has determined that if it kills eclipse, the processes spawned from eclipse will be killed as well. The ~960MB are probably the "totally recovered memory" of this action.

If you are running some processes from eclipse, please check they are not using extreme amounts of memory or that you actually terminate them completely. Eclipse does not terminate interactive processes you no longer use for you - you have to do that manually and keep in mind that the eclipse process console can "hide" active processes behind dead ones. Please refer to [1] for further help with the process console.

~Niels

[1] http://help.eclipse.org/helios/index.jsp?topic=%2Forg.eclipse.jdt.doc.user%2Freference%2Fviews%2Fconsole%2Fref-process_console.htm

[Fikrul Arif (fikr4n)]

@Niels
I've monitored with System Monitor, there's no child (dependant) process of eclipse. I also have checked the console, there's no running process. I'm confused, whether the cause is kernel, gnome-shell, or updated Android SDK (but I have not update the ADT, because of dependency conflicts).
I tried to reproduce the bug like this: open the user interface layout editor and do some drag and drop within TableLayout with TableRow, EditText, TextView, and ImageView. Sometimes only eclipse being killed, sometimes evince or other applications too.