Aqua Data Studio is running out of memory. How do I increase it?

Aqua Data Studio is running out of memory. How do I increase it?

Response

Jonathan Powers over 11 years ago
Memory Allocation in Aqua Data Studio

If Aqua Data Studio crashes, becomes unresponsive, or displays no output when querying for a large amount of data, it has likely run out of memory. The issue also appears when ADS exports large amounts of data to external applications. Such behavior is caused by Aqua Data Studio and JVM running out of memory.

When the JVM starts, it has a defined “Max Memory”. This memory allocation is defined by the “vmarg.2” variable in the /datastudio.ini file). By default, Aqua Data Studio is limited to 256MB of memory (“vmarg.2=-Xmx256M”). As the application uses memory, the JVM will allocate additional memory from the OS as needed; this amount is called “Total Memory”. The amount of memory used by the application within the JVM is called “Used Memory”. “Used Memory” will grow and shrink as the application uses memory, but “Total Memory” will increase only up to the size of the “Max Memory”. The problem results from the fact that the “Total Memory” of the JVM is not released until you restart the JVM. There have been numerous requests to Sun to change this behavior.

In the bottom right corner of Aqua Data Studio, you can see the “Used Memory” and “Total Memory” indicator. If it shows that the “Used Memory” size is nearing “Total Memory” size, you need to increase the amount of memory available to ADS (the “Max Memory” size).

Please refer to the following section of the ADS online documentation: https://www.aquaclusters.com/app/home/project/public/aquadatastudio/wikibook/Documentation/page/50/1.5+Launcher+%26+Memory+Configuration

Tips for lowering memory consumption

If you will be working with large query results:

Disable Text Results and Pivot Grid Results, and use only Grid Results. Text Results use three times more memory than Grid Results alone.
Disable Charts in File -> Options -> General -> Chart -> [Support Chart]
32-bit vs. 64-bit versions of Aqua Data Studio

The 32-bit version of ADS can use up to 1 GB memory (maximum value for “vmarg.2=-Xmx1024M” )

The 64-bit version of ADS is not limited to 1GB (maximum value for “vmarg.2” can be more than 1024), but the 64-bit version uses twice as much memory for the same operations as the 32-bit version. If you will be using less than a 1GB, then you should use the 32-bit version of ADS.