Increasing PermGen space for Jenkins/gradle

Question

I am running a Jenkins build of an Android project on a Mac Mini (10.9.5). The Jenkins build is failing with error messages like this:

<package>.myTest > test_myTest FAILED
org.mockito.cglib.core.CodeGenerationException at test_myTest.java:65
Caused by: java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException at test_myTest.java:65
Caused by: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError at test_myTest.java:65
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space

This is sometimes followed by messages like

Exception: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError thrown from the UncaughtExceptionHandler in thread "/0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1:50340 to /0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1:50339 workers Thread 2"
16:47:17 
16:47:17 Exception: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError thrown from the UncaughtExceptionHandler in thread "/0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1:50340 to /0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1:50339 workers Thread 4"
16:47:18 
16:47:18 Exception: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError thrown from the UncaughtExceptionHandler in thread "/0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1:50340 to /0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1:50339 workers Thread 5"
16:47:18 
16:47:18 Exception: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError thrown from the UncaughtExceptionHandler in thread "/0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1:50340 to /0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1:50339 workers Thread 6"
16:47:19 

It usually fails at the same point in the build. According to the Jenkins wiki

Do you consistently see OOME around the same phase in a build? If so, maybe it just needs a bigger memory.

this may mean I just need more PermGen space.

The stackoverflow posts/blog posts I've read indicate that I need to increase the max PermGen size (-XX:MaxPermSize=1024M, for example). However, I'm not clear on where to do this.

I've changed this for GRADLE_OPTS and JAVA_OPTS so my Jenkins build environment looks like this:

As seen in the screenshot, I also added some options to garbage collect Perm Gen as recommended here.

This seemed to be working--I had a few successful builds yesterday, but it's now failing again (with no changes that I'm aware of).

After reading this answer, I also changed the following line in my project's gradle.properties file.

org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xms1024M -Xmx2048M -XX:PermSize=512M -XX:MaxPermSize=2048 -XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

This hasn't fixed the problem.

Answers to similar questions like this and this make me think I may be approaching this the wrong way--should I be changing a computer setting for the Mac (10.9.5) which is running Jenkins? What is the correct way to modify the PermGen space?

Edit: I had previously thought that perhaps the environmental variables weren't being set, but I verified that they appear under the build result Environmental Variables (jenkins/job/<Project>/146/injectedEnvVars/)

Answer 1

As Integrating Stuff said, it was necessary to increase the MaxPermSize for the unit tests. I found how to do so here in the "Running from Gradle" section.

android {
    testOptions {
        unitTests.all {
            jvmArgs '-XX:MaxPermSize=1024m' //prevent OOM (PermGen space) while running tests
        }
    }
    ...
}