Along with being a software developer on our project, I have also become the unofficial tools administrator. We utilize many of the Atlassian tools, among them being JIRA. When JIRA was installed, it was put an a Windows Server 2008 R2 server, but was installed with the JIRA Standalone 32-bit installer. Due to the Windows memory addressing space when processes are running 32-bit, we could only allocate ~1GB of heap space to the JVM. Any more and the JVM would fail to start. Any less and the process would throw a java.lang.OutOf Memory error before it even started fully. Even at the magical 1GB heap size, we would only run stable for 0.5-1.0 day before we would blow the heap.
I contacted Atlassian support about getting our install running as a 64-bit process on a 64-bit JVM and their response was “Create a new database schema, install the 64-bit JIRA standalone pointing at that new schema and then migrate your data from the old schema to the new schema. No, not happening. I did some digging and figured out how to get the 32-bit install to run as a 64-bit process. Once I did this, the process started as a 64-bit Windows process and I was able to allocate more memory to the heap.
- Put a 64-bit JVM on the system, if it does not already have one.
- Change the Tomcat process properties to point to the 64-bit JVM.
- Rename tomcat.exe to tomcat.exe.x86
- Rename tomcat.exe.x64 to tomcat.exe
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