Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Debugging Eclipse Indigo plugins on OSX

I do not why this took me so long to figure out, but I have been having a problem with Indigo that whenever I fire up the Eclipse Runtime workbench to debug a plugin it would crash almost immediately. At first, I thought it had something to do with my plugins, but eventually I took the time to do a clean install without any of my plugins and saw the problem just by creating a simple demo project in the runtime. Since I already had a working Helios installation, I just shrugged and went back to using that for now and set the problem aside.

Well, last week I got a new Macbook Air with Lion preinstalled and so I am setting up a new system from scratch. This time I only have Indigo installed and lo and behold I am still seeing the same problem. Realizing that there must be a simple explanation, I now looked closer and see that there is a simple explanation. For some reason, on Indigo when it Eclipse creates your default configuration it is not including the PermGen settings by default. So I was just crashing due to not enough PermGen space errors. Pretty obvious, it has just been a long time since I had seen these problems.

Adding "-XX:MaxPermSize=256m" to the -vm arguments in my Runtime Configuration has everything working great again.