How to increase Android Studio memory limit in Mac

19 Jan 2015

The technical doc of configuring Android Studio on the Android Tools Project site is out dated. So you can not increase memory limit by configuring thestudio.vmoptions file under ~/Library/Preferences/AndroidStudio/ folder. Actually, in my case, there is no studio.vmoptions or idea.properties file like the doc said.

Locate the configuration file

If you are using Terminal, run command

open -e /Applications/Android\ Studio.app/Contents/bin/studio.vmoptions

Or, you can also open Applications folder in Finder, press ctrl then click or just right-click on Android Studio, choose Show Package Contents, you can findstudio.vmoptions file under Contents/bin folder.

Config your settings

You can just edit your studio.vmoptions file, increasing your Xms and Xmx.

Xmx specifies the maximum memory allocation pool for a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), while Xms specifies the initial memory allocation pool. Your JVM will be started with Xms amount of memory and will be able to use a maximum of Xmx amount of memory.

This is my configuration:

-Xms128m
-Xmx4096m
-XX:MaxPermSize=1024m
-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=200m
-XX:+UseCompressedOops

Once you make the changes, don't forget to RESTART Android Studio.

Other

If you want to fall back to default values, here it is:

-Xms128m
-Xmx750m
-XX:MaxPermSize=350m
-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=96m
-XX:+UseCompressedOops

Or you can download it from the Android Tools Project Site.

I think increasing the memory limit in IntelliJ IDEA is the same, I didn't check it though.