Changing the EAS web console heap size

Recently I was asked about a heap size issue with the 11.1.2.1 EAS web console, now I have never seen the following error before and probably won’t again as business rules slowly merge into calculation manager.

The reason I had probably not seen it before is because I don’t think I have had to deal with many rules that are 2MB in size and trying to save the rule in EAS would generate the error.

Anyway I was not going to even attempt to get into the reason why the rule was so big and just increase the maximum java heap size for the console.

If this was the standard EAS console then increasing the heap size is straight forward and just requires an edit to:

<drive>:\Oracle\Middleware\EPMSystem11R1\products\Essbase\eas\console\bin\admincon.bat

Update the –Xmx value from the default 256MB and restart the console and that’s it.

Increasing the maximum JVM size for the web console does not seem as simple though I am hoping somebody comes along and tells me I am idiot and provides a simpler solution.

If you start the web console you can see the min and max size being passed into Java

The default heap sizes are min 32MB and max 256MB.

I originally thought I could override the settings through the Java control panel

This did not seem to make any difference and the clients Java control panel was locked down so it wouldn’t have been that simple to get it implemented if it did work.

When starting up the EAS web console it reads a jnlp (Java Network Launching Protocol) file to set the parameters passed into the Java application so the file must exist somewhere in the EAS web application.

I found an easconsole.jnlp file sat in the easconsole.war file which is deployed with the EAS web app server.

I updated the file to increase the value held in the max-heap-size parameter, deleted the EAS web application server tmp folder and restarted the web application.

Still no joy the jnlp file that was being delivered still had the default settings, surely that is the file that is being used…Well maybe it was in previous versions but it is not being used in 11.1.2.1

I should have just left it there but it would play on my mind if I didn’t find the right file.

After searching some more I found another easconsole.jnlp

This file was hidden away within a java archive file webstart_server.jar within the EAS console web application.

I updated the file to increase the max to 1024MB, cleared the EAS web app tmp directory and browser cache then started the web app up again.

Success, this time the file I updated was the one being used by the web application.

It worth mentioning that hacking the files in a web app does work but if you patch EAS server it could wipe out any configuration settings and they would need to be applied again.

Now I am sure there is an easier solution and in the end the option taken was to use the standard EAS console with the simple method to increase JVM.

I will probably never have to do that again but at least I have written it down in case. :)