How To Fix Outofmemoryerror In Java

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError is thrown when JVM is unable to allocate memory to create an object. Java OutOfMemoryError is an Error and occurs a runtime.

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError

As the name suggests, OutOfMemoryError occurs when java runtime is out of memory. In this case garbage collector is unable to free more space required by program and hence error is thrown.

There are two main reasons to get java.lang.OutOfMemoryError:

Poor programming – infinite loop, not clearing memory by closing resources etc.
Low Memory – java is running on less memory than required.

Java OutOfMemoryError – Poor Programming Example

Let's look into a sample code that will throw java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space because the program is going into infinite loop and objects are getting created but not getting garbage collected. So eventually JVM will run out of memory.

                                  package com.journaldev.exceptions;  import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.List; import java.util.Random;  public class JavaOutOfMemoryErrorExample {  	public static void main(String[] args) { 		List<Integer> list = new ArrayList<>();  		Random random = new Random();  		while (true) 			list.add(random.nextInt());  	} }

When above code is executed, it will throw following exception after some time.

                                  Exception in thread "main" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space 	at java.base/java.lang.Integer.valueOf(Integer.java:1050) 	at com.journaldev.exceptions.JavaOutOfMemoryErrorExample.main(JavaOutOfMemoryErrorExample.java:15)

java lang OutOfMemoryError java heap space

This is an example of poor programming, but the good news is that the exception stack trace clearly points us to look for the code where this error occurred. However sometimes the problem might be in some other areas of the program, in that case we will need help of java profilers such as VisualVM to figure out where most of the memory is being allocated and how to optimize it.

Java OutOfMemoryError – Low Memory Example

Let's look at another example where the OutOfMemoryError is caused because we didn't allocate enough memory for program to execute properly.

                                  public class JavaOutOfMemoryErrorExample {  	public static void main(String[] args) { 		 		Integer[] array = new Integer[1000*1000*100]; 		System.out.println("Done"); 		 	}  }

Let's see what happens when we run above program with JVM max memory limit of 32 MB.

                                  $javac JavaOutOfMemoryErrorExample.java  $java -Xmx32m JavaOutOfMemoryErrorExample Exception in thread "main" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space 	at JavaOutOfMemoryErrorExample.main(JavaOutOfMemoryErrorExample.java:5)

As we can see that there is nothing wrong in the program, we are running it on very low memory. Let's try to fix this OutOfMemoryError by increasing the JVM memory to 256MB and then 512 MB.

                                  $java -Xmx256m JavaOutOfMemoryErrorExample Exception in thread "main" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space 	at JavaOutOfMemoryErrorExample.main(JavaOutOfMemoryErrorExample.java:5) $java -Xmx512m JavaOutOfMemoryErrorExample Done $

So it seems that our program runs fine when we provide enough memory to run it.

Increasing the memory of JVM is a quick fix to solve the problem, unless you are running on very low memory. If you are already running on high JVM memory such as 2GB or more, then you should look into the application code to optimize it, look into thread dump and java profiler output to see why your application requires high memory and if you can reduce it.

Reference: API Doc