I'm working with a client who recently upgraded from a shared hosting account on Lunarpages to a VPS account. The site needs to periodically fetch data from a database on another server, which it does by firing up a Java app and dumping the data to a CSV file. (It's a bit of a Rube Goldberg-ish system, but it works for now.) Note that I'm not serving JSP pages or using Tomcat or anything like that; just firing up the bog standard Java runtime and having it run an app which connects to and dumps data from a database.

This worked just fine on the shared hosting account, but I can't get the Java runtime to start at all on the VPS account. Trying to just fire up the Java runtime from the CLI results in:

Error occurred during initialization of VM
Could not reserve enough space for object heap
Could not create the Java virtual machine.

Searching around seems to reveal that this is a common problem on VPSs, but might be solvable with some voodoo by the sysadmins of the physical machine.

I haven't investigated installing an alternate runtime yet, due to lack of time, but before I do, has anyone else run in to this problem - or even better, has anyone been able to solve it?

In conclusion, are all these distracting animated emoticons all along the top of the message field really necessary?

Have you opened a tech support ticket?  What was their response?  Is Java runtime operations an option on VPS or do you need to step up to dedicated?

Ultimately, I did open a support ticket, but got nothing other than your standard budget tech support copy-paste responses. (Not that I blame the techs; that's the nature of the industry.)

I kept experimenting, though, and on Monday, I reinstalled Sun-standard Java and actually got it to work this time. I'm not sure if tech support actually tweaked the server and/or our account in some way and didn't specify it in the trouble ticket, or if I entered some sort of special Konami code during installation to get it to work, or if the stars were just aligned in the correct positions… but it's working for now, at least.

Further follow-up.

It turns out my previous celebratory post was premature. The problems are still occurring off and on.

Doing some research, I found that the Java runtime has some options to restrict how much memory it tries to grab for itself when it starts up, such as perestrelka mentioned above. Using "/usr/bin/java -Xmx16m -XX:MaxPermSize=20m -jar path/to/file.jar", I can sometimes get the script to run correctly, though most of the time there's still error problems of some sort - not necessarily the one in the opening post.

Running the job immediately after the server has restarted seems to greatly increase the probability that it will run correctly. I guess that's to be expected, but we want the job to run via cron twice a day, so restarting the server before it does so isn't exactly convenient.

In conclusion, (headdesk)

Oh, probably. There's a whole bunch of stuff running on this thing that I didn't install - it was all on there when the VPS was set up, apparently. Is this the norm in the industry? When we got our FreeBSD VPS from another company, it was a beautiful blank slate; we were able to to install and configure only what we needed from scratch.