How to Increase Ide Memory Limit in Intellij Idea on MAC

How to increase IDE memory limit in IntelliJ IDEA on Mac?

Current version: Help | Change Memory Settings:

Since IntelliJ IDEA 15.0.4 you can also use: Help | Edit Custom VM Options...:

This will automatically create a copy of the .vmoptions file in the config folder and open a dialog to edit it.

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Older versions:

IntelliJ IDEA 12 is a signed application, therefore changing options in Info.plist is no longer recommended, as the signature will not match and you will get issues depending on your system security settings (app will either not run, or firewall will complain on every start, or the app will not be able to use the system keystore to save passwords).

As a result of addressing IDEA-94050 a new way to supply JVM options was introduced in IDEA 12:

Now it can take VM options from
~/Library/Preferences/<appFolder>/idea.vmoptions and system properties
from ~/Library/Preferences/<appFolder>/idea.properties.

For example, to use -Xmx2048m option you should copy the original .vmoptions file from /Applications/IntelliJ IDEA.app/bin/idea.vmoptions to ~/Library/Preferences/IntelliJIdea12/idea.vmoptions, then modify the -Xmx setting.

The final file should look like:

-Xms128m
-Xmx2048m
-XX:MaxPermSize=350m
-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=64m
-XX:+UseCodeCacheFlushing
-XX:+UseCompressedOops

Copying the original file is important, as options are not added, they are replaced.

This way your custom options will be preserved between updates and application files will remain unmodified making signature checker happy.

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Community Edition: ~/Library/Preferences/IdeaIC12/idea.vmoptions file is used instead.

How to increase the memory heap size on IntelliJ IDEA?

Use Help | Edit Custom VM Options…

An editor will open automatically for the right .vmoptions file, adjust the value of -Xmx, save and restart IntelliJ IDEA:

Check these documents from IntelliJ IDEA knowledge base for more details:

• Configuring JVM options and platform properties
• The JVM could not be started. The main method may have thrown an exception.

Answers below suggest to edit .vmoptions file directly inside the application installation directory. Please note that it's not recommended since it will cause conflicts during patch updates. The method above creates a copy of the file in the CONFIG directory and your IDE installation remains intact.

Also be aware of the 32-bit address space limit on Windows which makes it hard to use heap sizes higher than 750m. Should you need to use larger heap, make sure to switch to the 64-bit JVM first, otherwise IDE may crash on start or start to crash randomly during work.

IntelliJ Idea 2016 memory problems on OSX

Found the solution:
Add this to custom properties (via the help menu; edit custom properties)

vcs.log.index.git=off

That way Idea doesnt attempt to index your entire repo and

How should I set the memory for IntelliJ 14?

Open Intellij IDE's vmoptions file

For Mac Users

Help | Edit Custom VM Options...

or

Library > Preferences > Idea<YourVersion> > idea.vmoptions

For Window (32bit) Users

C:\Program Files (x86)\JetBrains\IntelliJ IDEA <your_version>\bin\idea.exe.vmoptions

For Window (64bit) Users

C:\Program Files (x86)\JetBrains\IntelliJ IDEA <your_version>\bin\idea64.exe.vmoptions

and setup it's memory as you wish. Below is sample settings for 2GB

-Xms128m
-Xmx2048m
-XX:MaxPermSize=350m
-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=240m
-XX:+UseCodeCacheFlushing
-XX:+UseCompressedOops

Hopefully this help.

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