Mac OS X and IntelliJ crashes

less than 1 minute read

I've struggled in the past several weeks with repeated crashes from IntelliJ IDEA on Mac OS X. I suspect it started right after the upgrade to 1.6.5 and the latest Java VM update.

It seems it was cause by a couple of things.

Job scheduler crash
If your crash report shows something like
Thread 55 Crashed: Java: JobScheduler pool 1/2
This is a bug in the garbage collector. You need to pass an additional VM option to fix it
-XX:-ReduceInitialCardMarks
Open /Applications/IntelliJ IDEA x.y.z.app/Contents/Info.plist and update the VMOption key
<key>VMOptions</key>
<string>-XX:-ReduceInitialCardMarks -Xms128m -Xmx512m -XX:MaxPermSize=250m -ea -Xbootclasspath/a:../lib/boot.jar</string>
Font corrupted
Not sure if that was related to the previous issue but I initially had crashes with a different report involving directly the Garbage Collector (GC). My IntelliJ IDEA was using the Inconsolata font which apparently was somehow corrupted.

Removing fonts from ~/Library/Fonts solved the issue. What you can do is move them to a different directory and slowly re-inject them to find the culprit.

I am quite happy all this is behind me. I chose:

  • A Java VM
  • On Mac OS X
  • with IntelliJ IDEA

to precisely avoid this kind of bad experience and time waste :) Back to normal.

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