Configuring the IntelliJ IDEA JVM on OS X
Out of the box the JVM arguments for IntelliJ IDEA need a bit of tweaking if you plan on doing any serious development. Lately, in addition to Flex 4, I’ve been cutting my teeth on Groovy and Grails and I’ve found IDEA’s 256mb default heap size to be barely adequate for the task. Bringing the heap maximum up to 512mb (-Xmx512m) makes a huge difference in how the IDE and framework perform.
When I went Googling for information on how to set the IDEA JVM on OS X I assumed I would find a wealth of information for said task. Turns out I was both right and wrong. There is a wealth of information but it’s all for Windows and since the IDEA config under Windows is different than OS X I was left wanting. In the end I was able to Google one lonely site with the correct information for OS X but the site was offline and I ended up having to use Google cache to get the information. Hopefully this post will help the next poor soul who goes looking for how to set the IDEA JVM heap maximum under OS X.
- Locate the App. If you have a standard installation it will be under /Applications
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. - Open the App package
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. - Using your text editor of choice open the info.plist file under “contents”
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. - Edit the “VMOptions” key. I have my heap maximum set at 512mb and my minimum at 64mb
That’s it. Restart IDEA if it’s running and you should see your heap changes in right corner of the application status bar.
By the way, if you’re doing any Groovy or Grails development, IntelliJ IDEA is a fantastic IDE with undoubtedly the best Grails support around.
