Overcoming issues related to Java Heap Space while building Android projects can be quite challenging and frustrating. Understanding the concept of heap memory in Java is crucial, as well as being aware of the available solutions.

This article will provide a brief explanation of the reasons behind the occurrence of the Java Heap Space issue and present Codemagic’s recommended solutions for addressing it.

I recently added some gradle tasks to my Android project, which stuffed my project with memory-hungry gradle tasks, e.g. DexGuard and ProGuard, that ended up requiring more heap space memory and the machine fell short of providing it. To put more context into it, while executing tasks, it was either exiting Daemon by shutting it down prematurely or throwing java.lang.OutOfMemoryError :

ERROR:: R8: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.
* What went wrong:
Execution failed for task ':app:minifyReleaseWithR8'.
> com.android.tools.r8.CompilationFailedException: Compilation failed to complete

During the project’s construction, I found it unexpected that running DexGuard demanded a significantly larger amount of memory than what some machines could manage. This was already impacting the release pipelines that had to be tested and deployed to the Google Play Store.

The limitation does not specifically apply only to DexGuard or ProGuard, but any other gradle tasks might restrict build pipelines by requiring more memory. There are some suggestions out there to get the issue resolved:

1. Consider updating the gradle-wrapper.properties file to the latest version of Gradle and the android/build.gradle file to the latest version of the Android Gradle plugin as this may resolve the issue. However, working with their Java version compatibility can be tricky by keeping in mind that projects do not support the latest versions of Gradle and AGP.

2. Increasing the -Xmx heap size without confirmation of sufficient available memory from the machine is uncertain. If the assigned heap size exceeds the machine’s capacity, the value will be disregarded.

Codemagic to the rescue

Codemagic as a CI/CD platform did the team a huge favour by speeding up workflow pipelines along with automatically conducting tests, creating builds, and releasing team apps on the Play Store, on top of addressing the Java Heap Space issue. Codemagic’s robust machines have made building, testing, and publishing not just Android but iOS applications incredibly easy. Struggles with not only the Java Heap Space error but also other related issues can be relieved through the powerful machines provided by Codemagic:

1. macOS with Apple M2, M2 Pro, Max and Ultra chips
2. Linux with arm64 and x64 architectures
3. Windows

Conclusion

Contact here if your Android builds are affected by OOM (out of memory) error or similar issues, and you are interested in trying any of these machines with extended specifications.