Version v0.26 of Metabase is no longer supported. Check out the docs for the current stable version, Metabase v0.63.
On Java 7, Metabase may fail to launch with a message like
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space
or one like
Exception: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError thrown from the UncaughtExceptionHandler
If this happens, setting a few JVM options should fix your issue:
java -XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -jar target/uberjar/metabase.jar
You can also pass JVM arguments by setting the environment variable JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS, e.g.
JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS='-XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:MaxPermSize=256m'
Alternatively, you can upgrade to Java 8 instead, which will fix the issue as well.
Normally, the JVM can figure out how much RAM is available on the system and automatically set a sensible upper bound for heap memory usage. On certain shared hosting environments, however, this doesn’t always work perfectly. If Metabase fails to start with an error message like
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
You’ll just need to set a JVM option to let it know explicitly how much memory it should use for the heap space:
java -Xmx2g -jar metabase.jar
Adjust this number as appropriate for your shared hosting instance. Make sure to set the number lower than the total amount of RAM available on your instance, because Metabase isn’t the only process that’ll be running. Generally, leaving 1-2 GB of RAM for these other processes should be enough; for example, you might set -Xmx to 1g for an instance with 2 GB of RAM, 2g for one with 4 GB of RAM, 6g for an instance with 8 GB of RAM, and so forth. You may need to experiment with these settings a bit to find the right number.
As above, you can use the environment variable JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS to set JVM args instead of passing them directly to java. This is useful when running the Docker image,
for example.
docker run -d -p 3000:3000 -e "JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS=-Xmx2g" metabase/metabase