BI Publisher – OC4J Crashing

BI Publisher – OC4J crashing with “Out of Memory Error”

Repeatedly customers get the “Out of Memory Error” when they are running high volume/complex BI Publisher reports (formerly Oracle XML Publisher) on 32bit environment using OC4J. Why you get this error when you try to generate these kind of reports in BI Publisher and how to resolve this issue?

There are multiple ways you can resolve this issue.

1) Login to OC4J server and Increase the OC4J timeout in server properties because sometime it take more time to fetch the data and oc4j has timeout parameter which exceeds timeout limit and your oc4j crashes.

2) Modify/tune the SQL to avoid complex join to fetch the results faster. By doing this it will use less memory and return the data within timeout timeframe. Also since you are running on 32bit environment change the multi-threading to single threading. It will run slower than normal but you may get the results back.

3) In oc4j_cmd by default the memory is set to 256K. In 32bit environment oc4j is allowed to use maximum of 1536K memory out of 4GB which is Windows has a limit on 32bit environment. This is more than enough but sometime if you have reports which has more than 2000 pages with auto bursting reports (rare case which I have experienced). You can change the memory in oc4j to 512K to 1024K or 1536K by using following command:

Take the following steps to change the heap size values for an OC4J instance:
1. Navigate to the Home page for the OC4J instance.
2. Click Administration.
3. If necessary, expand the Properties section of the table by clicking the Expand icon. Then, click the Go to Task icon in the Server Properties row.
4. In the Command Line Options area, change the value in the Maximum heap size and Initial heap size fields.
5. Click Apply.
6. Navigate to the Cluster Topology page, select the OC4J instance that you modified, and click Restart. On the Confirmation page, click Yes.
This changes the size of the heap allocated to the OC4J process (only for that single instance). If your Oracle Application Server topology includes more than one JVM on the same system, The heap changes must be apply to each JVM.

OR go to C:\OracleBI\oc4j_bi\bin folder and modify oc4j.cmd file, save and restart the OC4J service.

Also you can monitor the heap size by logging to OC4J and check under performance tab:

4) If you are running Presentation server on Windows server, the oc4j memory is shared by BI Presentation sever and BI Publisher. You move the presentation server from OC4J to IIS by re-installing the OBIEE on window box. During installation, it will provide an option for you to use OC4J or IIS for BI Presentation service and you should choose IIS. This way it will release the memory which is used by Presentation service. Also In future if oc4j crashes, still Users will be able to login on OBIEE and run Dashboards & Reports and won’t effect them since your presentation services configure on IIS.