Learning Android: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space with android-maven-plugin

I’ve been trying to adapt my Android application to fit into the structure of the RobolectricSample so that I can add some tests around my code but I was running into a problem when trying to deploy the application.

To deploy the application you need to run the following command:

mvn package android:deploy

Which was resulting in the following error:

[INFO] UNEXPECTED TOP-LEVEL ERROR:
[INFO] java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
[INFO] 	at com.android.dx.rop.code.PlainInsn.withNewRegisters(PlainInsn.java:152)
[INFO] 	at com.android.dx.ssa.NormalSsaInsn.toRopInsn(NormalSsaInsn.java:121)
[INFO] 	at com.android.dx.ssa.back.SsaToRop.convertInsns(SsaToRop.java:342)
[INFO] 	at com.android.dx.ssa.back.SsaToRop.convertBasicBlock(SsaToRop.java:323)
[INFO] 	at com.android.dx.ssa.back.SsaToRop.convertBasicBlocks(SsaToRop.java:260)
[INFO] 	at com.android.dx.ssa.back.SsaToRop.convert(SsaToRop.java:124)
[INFO] 	at com.android.dx.ssa.back.SsaToRop.convertToRopMethod(SsaToRop.java:70)
[INFO] 	at com.android.dx.ssa.Optimizer.optimize(Optimizer.java:102)
[INFO] 	at com.android.dx.ssa.Optimizer.optimize(Optimizer.java:73)

I’d added a few dependencies to the original pom.xml file so I figured on of those must be causing the problem and eventually narrowed it down to be the twitter4j-core library which I had defined like this in the pom.xml file:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.twitter4j</groupId>
  <artifactId>twitter4j-core</artifactId>
  <version>[2.2,)</version>
</dependency>

I found a bug report for the maven-android-plugin which suggested that increasing the heap size might solve the problem.

That section of the pom.xml file ended up looking like this:

<plugin>
  <groupId>com.jayway.maven.plugins.android.generation2</groupId>
  <artifactId>android-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>3.0.0-alpha-13</version>
  <configuration>
    <sdk>
      <platform>10</platform>
      <path>/path/to/android-sdk</path>                
    </sdk>
    <dex>                                
      <jvmArguments>
        <jvmArgument>-Xms256m</jvmArgument>                                        
        <jvmArgument>-Xmx512m</jvmArgument>
      </jvmArguments>                        
    </dex>
    <undeployBeforeDeploy>true</undeployBeforeDeploy>
  </configuration>
  <extensions>true</extensions>
</plugin>

That seemed to get rid of the problem but I also tried changing the plugin version to the latest one and that seemed to solve the problem as well without the need to add the JVM arguments:

<plugin>
  <groupId>com.jayway.maven.plugins.android.generation2</groupId>
  <artifactId>android-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <configuration>
    <sdk>
      <platform>10</platform>
      <path>/path/to/android-sdk</path>                
    </sdk>
    <undeployBeforeDeploy>true</undeployBeforeDeploy>
  </configuration>
  <extensions>true</extensions>
</plugin>

The latest version is 3.0.2 from what I can tell.

From http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2012/01/07/learning-android-java-lang-outofmemoryerror-java-heap-space-with-android-maven-plugin/