--launcher.XXMaxPermSize appears twice in eclipse.ini

Question

My eclipse is crashing with OOO: perm-gen error. I opened up the eclipse.ini to increase it but to my surprise I found two occurences of the XXMaxPermSize as shown below.. I am not sure why there are two and which one to change.

-startup
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.3.0.v20120522-1813.jar
--launcher.library
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.win32.win32.x86_1.1.200.v20120522-1813
-product
org.eclipse.epp.package.java.product
--launcher.defaultAction
openFile
--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
512M
-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256m
--launcher.defaultAction
openFile
-vmargs
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
-Dhelp.lucene.tokenizer=standard
-Xms40m
-Xmx512m

Answer 1

From the official Eclipse.ini documentation, you need to remove the first one and then change just the second one.

-startup
../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.2.0.v20110502.jar
--launcher.library
../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.cocoa.macosx.x86_64_1.1.100.v20110502
-product
org.eclipse.epp.package.jee.product
--launcher.defaultAction
openFile
-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256m
--launcher.defaultAction
openFile
-vmargs
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
-XX:MaxPermSize=256m
-Xms40m
-Xmx512m

Answer 2

I suppose that it's a minor mistake, which will be fixed some time. From experience, I can tell that with duplicate options in the INI file the last one counts. It's also safe to remove any duplicates (e.g. launcher.defaultAction and launcher.XXMaxPermSize).

Answer 3

If your eclipse is bootstrap by JDK 1.8 this has no relevance and can be ignored. http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/122 http://wiki.eclipse.org/FAQ_How_do_I_increase_the_permgen_size_available_to_Eclipse%3F