Why does sbt compile fail with StackOverflowError?

Question

I am working on a Scala project that has been in existence for a few years but is new to me. My task is to upgrade it from Scala 2.9.3 to 2.11.7, along with its dependencies. I

Answer 1

I was unable to get this to work via the provided answers. build.sbt settings and the sbtopts file both failed to solve this error for me. What I had to do was run sbt with the -mem flag, for example:

sbt -mem 2048 compile

and now my projects built. If using IntelliJ you can also go to

Preferences > Build, Execution, Deployment > Build Tools > sbt 

and set Maximum heap size, MB to whatever target you need.

Answer 2

I too run into this problem recently and I discovered a working solution for it with sbt 1.3.13.

1. create a .sbtopts file under project root
2. add -J-Xss100M (or any thread stack size you think suitable) to the .sbtopts file

Answer 3

Relevant parts from the output of sbt -h:

  # jvm options and output control
  JAVA_OPTS          environment variable, if unset uses ""
  .jvmopts           if this file exists in the current directory, its contents
                     are appended to JAVA_OPTS
  SBT_OPTS           environment variable, if unset uses ""
  .sbtopts           if this file exists in the current directory, its contents
                     are prepended to the runner args

Thus, in my case I solved the problem by creating a file .sbtopts with content

-J-Xmx4G 
-J-Xss4M

in the project directory.

Note: Running sbt -d shows what settings have been used, for instance:

$ sbt -d
[addSbt] arg = '-debug'
[process_args] java_version = '8'
# Executing command line:
java
-Xms1024m
-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=128m
-XX:MaxMetaspaceSize=256m
-Xmx2G
-Xss2M
-jar
/path/to/sbt-launch.jar
-debug

Answer 4

I discovered the SBT_OPT setting in the bin/sbt file of my sbt install was affecting the memory values set in my projects build.sbt

updating the existing -Xss value in this file from 1M to 8M raised the memory size of the Scalac stack to a point I stopped getting StackOverflow exceptions in the sbt-invoked compiler. This seemed odd because the sbt documented approach to setting stack size in the compiler is to do this is with the -J-Xss setting.

Sbt doesn't seem to actually enable you to set the compiler's stack memory. While a build.sbt accepts the following configuration as a valid setting, it doesn't seem to apply the value in the compiler:

scalacOptions in ThisBuild ++= Seq(-J-Xss8M)

I suspect that is a bug or non-implemented functionality

Answer 5

There are multiple Correct Answers already. But what worked for me is below,

// Created and Added a File: .jvmopts in the Project Root Folder with below Parameters.
-Xms3022m
-Xmx4048m
-Xss124m
-XX:MaxPermSize=4048m
-XX:MaxMetaspaceSize=512m
-XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled
-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=128m

Answer 6

I figured it out. Once I knew that the -d flag would tell me what settings SBT was actually using, I saw that the values in my SBT_OPTS environment variable were being clobbered by other, lower settings. Where were those coming from? From my JAVA_OPTS env variable! I should have noticed them sooner, but now I know I can keep those Java options as they are and override them by adding the SBT-specific settings to my /usr/local/etc/sbtopts file, using the somewhat awkward format of

-J-Xmx2G
-J-Xss2M 

Using the values shown I was able to run sbt compile successfully on my project.

I hope someone finds this useful.