Whilst upgrading our TeamCity server from 6.5 to 7.x, I encountered an error:
Unexpected error occurred inside Alarm task: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: GC overhead limit exceeded
After a bit of looking around and sifting through some very weird articles I was able to find some good information on this. Basically, the JVM starts by default with 512mb of memory and it was struggling to process our 300+ build configurations with this. In order to fix it I had to do the following:
- Go to TeamCity webserver
- Open CMD
- cd <TeamCity root dir>
- cd bin
- teamcity7w.exe //ES//TeamCity
- If you are on TeamCity 6.x then you need to run teamcity6w.exe rather than ..7w
This will open the following dialog:
Go to the Java tab and change the maximum memory pool entry to something other than 512mb
Restart the service and all should be well with the application start-up.