Increase memory of Eclipse Ant Runner

I am running the Eclipse ant runner from command line in the following way:

set LAUNCHER=xx\xx\org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.1.3.0.jar
xx\xx\java.exe -jar %LAUNCHER% -application org.eclipse.ant.core.antRunner -buildfile build.xml

I am facing OutOfMemory errors in the heap space. Adding -vmargs -Xmx512m to the command line or and changing the properties of my eclipse installation eclipse.ini file didn’t fixed the issue.

In order to be sure that the vmargs are taken into account I simply wrote the folowing task:

public class DisplayTask extends Task {
@Override
public void execute() throws BuildException {
System.out.println(Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() / 1000000);
}
}

and just launch it in my build.xml (using taskedf to define the task). The output is always 66 whatever I put in -vmargs -Xmx ….
After several tests I got the solution by adding -Xmx512m  only (without -vmargs) option just after the java.exe as folowing:

xx\xx\java.exe -Xmx512m -jar %LAUNCHER% -application org.eclipse.ant.core.antRunner -buildfile build.xml

Conclusion: the ant runner application doesn’t read neither the -vmargs command line options nor the eclipse.ini file options. Thus the only solution to increase memory for it is to directly pass the option to the Java virtual machine.

Sequential Jobs

Following this post about RCP application progress report  we have the following use case:

1. User Action
2. Start first Job (unknown length)
3. Wait for first Job to finish and start second Job (known length)
4. Wait for second Job to finish and start third Job (known length)

We want to show this to the user in the following way:

1. Have a main “User Action” dialog without global progress bar (because of the 1st job length is unknown and really variable upon executions length I can’t get an accurate total length) or with an “unknown” length
2. In this dialog have 3 sub parts one for each job with one progress bar for each one of this jobs and off course with IProgressMonitor.UNKNOWN style for the first job.
3. In this dialog the progress bars will be updated sequentially as the underlying jobs.

This will allow the end user to immediately see that its action is divided into 3 sub-tasks (the sub-tasks are meaningful for end users) and each time a new sub-task is started he can see the length of this sub-task (unknown for the first).

After many searches we were not able to implement that using the Eclipse Job API,  and today we are reporting these 3 sub-tasks as 3 individual successive dialogs with the drawback that the end user may initially thinks that his action will be completed at the end of the first unknown sub-task.

How does the Eclipse workbench’s team and YOU handle such situations ?