Problem

Bamboo builds start failing when executed on elastic agents and the following exception is observed in the Bamboo System Error Details page (accessible through the Bamboo UI):

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: GC overhead limit exceeded
	at java.io.UnixFileSystem.resolve(UnixFileSystem.java:108)
	at java.io.File.<init>(File.java:367)
	at org.apache.tools.ant.DirectoryScanner.scandir(DirectoryScanner.java:1256)
	...

Diagnosis

Environment

• An elastic agent is an agent that runs in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). An elastic agent process runs in an elastic instance of an elastic image.

Diagnostic Steps

• If the build process is running out of memory while executing a Maven or Ant task, please check the "Bamboo builds fail due to java.lang.OutOfMemoryError" knowledge base article as it describes how to workaround the problem and allocate more memory to both ANT_OPTS and MAVEN_OPTS.
• If you are not running one of the tasks mentioned above, but the elastic agent is still running out of memory, please continue to read.

Cause

The default memory setting for the elastic agent is 256MB. It is necessary to adjust the settings to run a bigger elastic agent with sufficient memory.

Resolution

For Bamboo 8.0.0 and later versions

Elastic Agent startup scripts, provided in the atlassian-bamboo-elastic-image, use a dedicated variable WRAPPER_PROPERTIES that can carry one or multiple properties and is passed to the Elastic Agent startup command. The WRAPPER_PROPERTIES variable can be set up in an Elastic Image startup script in Bamboo to increase the initial and maximum Java heap size:

Go to Bamboo administration >> Overview >> Elastic Bamboo >> Image configurations page. From there edit the desired elastic image and add the following script to the Instance startup script field:

Linux:

sudo su -c "echo \"export WRAPPER_PROPERTIES='\"-Dwrapper.java.maxmemory=2048\" \"-Dwrapper.java.initmemory=512\"'\" >> /etc/profile.d/bamboo.sh"

Windows:

Option 1:

powershell.exe -Command "[System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable(\"WRAPPER_PROPERTIES\", '\"-Dwrapper.java.maxmemory=2048\" \"-Dwrapper.java.initmemory=512\"', 'Machine')"

The WRAPPER_PROPERTIES variable can also be used to pass other properties to the agent, please see the Elastic Agent supervisor documentation for more details.

For Bamboo versions below 8.0.0

It is possible to change the heap size of the elastic agent using the Instance startup script option located on the Bamboo administration >> Overview >> Elastic Bamboo >> Image configurations page. From there edit the desired elastic image and add the following script to the Instance startup script field:

Linux:

sed -i 's@.*MARKER.*@sed -i "s/-Xmx256m/-Xmx512m/" $startupScript@' /opt/bamboo-elastic-agent/bin/bamboo-elastic-agent

Windows:

Option 1:

sed -i "s/-Dimagefiles/-Dbamboo.agent.syncOnly -Dimagefiles/" C:\opt\bamboo-elastic-agent\bin\bamboo-elastic-agent.bat
sed -i 's@cd %%OLD_PWD%%@sed -i \'s/-Xmx256m/-Xmx512m/\' \%%TEMP\%%\\\\bamboo-agent-bootstrap-1.bat\n\%%TEMP\%%\\\\bamboo-agent-bootstrap-1.bat ^>^>bamboo-elastic-agent.out 2^>\^&1\ncd %%OLD_PWD%%@' C:\opt\bamboo-elastic-agent\bin\bamboo-elastic-agent.bat

Option 2:

setx -m _JAVA_OPTIONS "-Xms256m -Xmx512m"

This will increase the maximum elastic agent memory to 512MB. It is possible to adjust the -Xmx setting to allocate more memory to the agent, if necessary.