Error Applying SP1 to upgraded AEM 6.1 - GC overhead limit exceeded

[Rob_Curran__T4G]

AEM 6.0 SP3 environment was upgraded following documented steps to AEM 6.1.

Applying AEM 6.1 SP1 to Author instance via the Package Manager failed with the following error:

Error during processing:

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: GC overhead limit exceeded

After several attempts disabled GC overhead limit with the following JVM param:

-XX:-UseGCOverheadLimit

The SP now appears as tho it MAY finish installing someday, however, it is iterating through Aggregation status messages and has been for over 10hrs. And there are java heap errors in the logs.

Currently at:

- Aggregation status: 57 of 29049 prepared, 28278 collected.

Incidentally, the application of SP1 to the corresponding Publish instance completed normally.

Has anyone else experienced this behavior?  Recommendations?

Thanks.

[smacdonald2008]

Sent this to support to see if this is a known issue. 

[Abhinav_m]

Howz the memory allocated to your instance?

[Rob_Curran__T4G]

set jvm_mx=2048m

:: default JVM options
:: separate multiple entries by ";" or "#"
:: if you need these chars put them inside single quotes
set jvm_options=-Xmx2048m#-XX:MaxPermSize=256M#-XX:-UseGCOverheadLimit

[Sham_HC]

you have faced the OOME. The "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: GC overhead limit exceeded" message means that for some reason
the garbage collector is taking an excessive amount of time. if more than 98% of the total time is spent in garbage collection and less than 2% of the heap is recovered,
an OutOfMemoryError will be thrown. This means that the instance stops doing any progress and is busy running only the garbage collection at all time.
This feature is designed to prevent applications from running for an extended period of time while making little or no progress because the heap is too small.
If necessary, this feature can be disabled by adding the option -XX:-UseGCOverheadLimit to the command line.   But that won's solve original problem. 

As an alternative try placing sp at <crx-quickstart>/install

Either your desktop has limited memory (Also May be allocated to other application running as same desktop) Or aem not configured to recomemnded heap.  If you rulled out a possibility of both, then take a heap dump[1] file a case with support team along with the logs,startup script. 

[1] https://helpx.adobe.com/experience-manager/kb/AnalyzeMemoryProblems.html

[Abhinav_m]

2GB might not be enough. Try bumping it to 4GB and then try. I am pretty sure you'll be alright.

[Rob_Curran__T4G · Accepted solution]

I was just in the process of trying that when I saw this post.

With the memory set to 4096m the SP installed successfully in 363100ms (6 minutes).

Clearly the min memory for this Author instance should be 4GB based on memory usage during the deployment.