Stuck at the Starting Gate: JVM Terminated

For a while now we’ve gotten occasional reports from developers that couldn’t get Carbide to launch. When they try, they see an error like this:

JVM terminated.Exit code=-1
-Xms40m
-Xmx1024m
-XX:MaxPermSize=98M
-Djava.class.path=c:\ProgramFiles\Nokia\Carbide.c++\plugins\org.eclipse.eguinox.launcher_1.0.1.R33x_v20070828.jar
-os win32
-ws win32
-arch x86
-showsplash
-launcher C:\ProgramFiles\Nokia\Carbide.c++ v1.3\carbide.c++.1.3.exe
-name Carbide.c++.1.3
–launcher.lidrary C:\Program Files\Nokia\Carbide.c++ v1.3_2\plugins\org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.win32.win32.x86_1.0.1.R33x_v20071019\eclips_1021.dll
-startup C:\Program Files\Nokia\Carbide.c++ v1.3_2\plugins\org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.0.1R33x_v20070828.jar
-vm C:\ProgramFiles\Nokia\Carbide.c++ v13\jre\bin\client\jvm.dll
-vmargs
-Xms40m
-Xmx1024m
-XX:MaxPermSize=96M
-Djava.class.path=c:\ProgramFiles\Nokia\Carbide.c++\plugins\org.eclipse.eguinox.launcher_1.0.1.R33x_v20070828.jar

The workaround is documented in the online help, but if Carbide can’t be launched that makes reading the release notes somewhat challenging. Given that, I wanted to throw this out here so that developers with decent Google skills can find the solution.

We have not been able to reproduce this problem in-house, but there is a way around it. In the main Carbide.c++ directory there is a file named carbide.c++.ini. It contains some parameters that manage the Java heap size. The one you’re interested in is the -Xmx parameter, which by default is set to 1024M (1GB of memory.) If you get the JVM error, try reducing this in increments of 128: -Xmx896M, -Xmx768M, etc. That should get you running. One thing to keep in mind is that if you reduce this parameter too much it could degrade Carbide’s performance and could also cause out of memory errors in memory-intensive components like the Performance Investigator.