Adjusting the memory footprint in the Netbeans debugger

A quick little tidbit on something that I should have found a lot easier. If you want to adjust the amount of memory dedicated to debugging sessions in NetBeans you don't look for a debugger setting, rather you adjust the general settings for the project you wish to debug.

1. Right click on the project
2. Select properties
3. Adjust the VM Options

As a first approach I suggest increasing the Xmx option as I have done in the picture below.

If you need more fine grain memory tuning a good place is to start with Ken Sipe's blog entry:

http://kensipe.blogspot.com/2009/02/java-memory-management-details.html

Ken does a good job with his talks on JVM tuning. I have kept an old presentation of his from a NFJS a few years ago and often start there when I need to do some JVM tuning. A more in depth blog entry on the subject can be found on Pete Freitag's blog.