Intellij IDEA won't start

Question

When I open Intellij 14 , it starts the initial loading and then following is shown in the screen.After that it is vanished and program does not start.

But when I open the task manager it is shown in the Processes as per the below figure.

Sometimes the program starts after about 10 minutes .Sometimes it won't start at all.Can someone give me a solution on how to overcome this problem ?

If IntelliJ be throwing any errors, you might be able to see this in the log file. You can find the IntelliJ system log file at this location (or something similar to this): `C:\Users\lasithako\.IntelliJIdea14\system\log\idea.log` Have a look at this file and see if you determine what might be happening. — Tim Biegeleisen, Jul 30 '15 at 05:08
If you see any problems in the log, then please update your question with a stack trace. — Tim Biegeleisen, Jul 30 '15 at 05:09
For those who are on Windows and want to see the VM options file used by IntelliJ IDEA, go to `C:\Program Files (x86)\JetBrains\IntelliJ IDEA 2016.3\bin` > open **idea.bat**, add `echo FILE = %VM_OPTIONS_FILE%`, open a cmd and run that bat file. It will show the file containing the used values (E.g.: `-Xmx2048m`). — ROMANIA_engineer, Jan 19 '17 at 14:31

score 95 · Answer 1 · edited Dec 07 '18 at 00:00

Just like Tom, I too have increased the memory when IntelliJ asked and regretted it. This is the screen that asked for it:

However, in my case, instead of editing the .vmoptions files in the bin folder, IntelliJ created a new one in my home directory which I can only assume overrides the ones in the bin folder. I would assume this is typical of the new versions - I am using IntelliJ 2016.1 right now.

So, in order to fix this issue, go to C:\Users\<your_username>\.IntelliJIdea<version>\config (or your OS' equivalent) and delete the idea.exe.vmoptions and/or idea64.exe.vmoptions file from there. This should remove the override and have IntelliJ use the settings in the bin folder.

It might be worth checking the files in the bin folder as well, in case IntelliJ changes how it handles these settings.

Here are the default .vmoptions files in the installation's bin folder; you can't delete these as it will prevent IntelliJ from starting:

bin/idea.exe.vmoptions:

-server
-Xms128m
-Xmx512m
-XX:MaxPermSize=250m
-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=150m
-ea
-Dsun.io.useCanonCaches=false
-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true
-Djsse.enableSNIExtension=false
-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
-XX:SoftRefLRUPolicyMSPerMB=50

bin/idea64.exe.vmoptions

-Xms128m
-Xmx750m
-XX:MaxPermSize=350m
-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=225m
-ea
-Dsun.io.useCanonCaches=false
-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true
-Djsse.enableSNIExtension=false
-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
-XX:SoftRefLRUPolicyMSPerMB=50

I changed -XX:MaxPermSize to 250m and it started working. thanks — aida, Jun 12 '16 at 11:22
I hat mine at 1500mb and until I changed it back to 512mb I couldn't start the program. I don't understand why... — smuggledPancakes, Sep 21 '16 at 14:59
Thank you very much for your answer! It worked perfectly fine! This should be marked as correct answer! — skywalker, Feb 01 '17 at 08:28
One other wrinkle - If you accidentally run the 32 bit version it lets you put in -Xmx2048m through the dialog, but the server cannot allocate this much memory in 32 bit idea. — sf_jeff, Mar 01 '17 at 02:49

score 31 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 25 '16 at 16:41

31

I got an out-of-memory dialog on intellij 15 and took an option on that dialog to increase max memory. Thereafter I could not start intellij. So, I looked in the intellij /bin folder for a pid file (per another stack overflow question) to see what was happening, but I could not find one. There was however a file (idea.exe.vmoptions) that had changed (to hold my new memory setting). So I edited that file to set max memory back to what I had before, and now it works.

answered Apr 25 '16 at 16:41

Tom Murphy

321
3
3

10

Just had the exact same issue. I used IntelliJ through pinned Windows taskbar shortcut, which by default, points to 32-bit version. It cannot handle more than 1 GB of memory (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13489469/how-to-increase-intellij-32bit-xmx-more-than-1gb). So to get more memory one should ensure idea64 executable is used. – nachteil Apr 27 '16 at 08:35

score 12 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 27 '20 at 09:47

12

You can try to open Intellij on CLI.

cd C:\Program Files\JetBrains\IntelliJ IDEA 2020.1\bin

later then execute this command

idea.bat

Probably Intellij will open. If it will not open then you can see the error message why it will not open on CLI.

answered Apr 27 '20 at 09:47

Oguzhan Cevik

638
8
18

1

This helped me figure out the issue atleast , thank you! – Rishikesh Fanse Jul 07 '20 at 10:12
Yep! For me, it turns intellij was already running but the UI wasn't rendering at all. I killed it in task manager and it started working again after rerunning. – takanuva15 Jul 09 '21 at 20:01

score 5 · Answer 4 · edited Jun 03 '22 at 13:22

5

C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\JetBrains\

if you are a Windows user, remove this directory. It helped me

edited Jun 03 '22 at 13:22

Suraj Rao

29,388
11
94
103

answered Jun 03 '22 at 13:14

Hamza Rasheed

179
1
2

score 3 · Answer 5 · answered Aug 26 '19 at 22:08

Just updated IntelliJ to a newer version, and I followed the 'configure' link to double the memory used for IntelliJ which I later regret. IntelliJ could not restart. Open the system.log (e.g. Use CMD+SPACE_BAR and search 'console' on MacOs, then go to system.log), I can see IntelliJ aborted a few times with an abnormal code 1. Here the lines related to the launch,

Processing VMOptions file at 
 /Users/[user]/Library/Preferences/IntelliJIdea2019.2/idea.vmoptions
com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.jetbrains.intellij.22016[2971]): Service exited with abnormal code: 1

I can see the path from where IntelliJ loads vm options during the launch. Checking the bin/ of my IntelliJ application, I can see another version of the idea.vmoptions file that has a slightly older timestamp. By comparing the content of the two files, I now realized that IntelliJ created another vm option file that has only a sub set of options in a newer location which broke the restart. Deleting or just safely renaming the newer file in the [User] sub directory fixed my problem.

score 3 · Answer 6 · answered Aug 01 '21 at 11:30

For me, the cause was a bad plugin.

I moved all plugins in below directory to a backup directory, and started IDEA, and it started without an issue.

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\JetBrains\IntelliJIdea2021.2\plugins

Then, copied plugins back to the above directory one by one, to identify the broken plugin.

score 2 · Answer 7 · answered May 18 '18 at 01:42

2

Edit C:\Program Files (x86)\JetBrains\IntelliJ IDEA 15.0.6\bin\idea.exe.vmoptions the Xmx to Xmx512

-server
-Xms128m
-Xmx512m

answered May 18 '18 at 01:42

Kerisnarendra

877
9
14

score 2 · Answer 8 · answered Apr 06 '19 at 05:25

Following steps helped me to overcome the Java heap size related issues on InteliJ IDEA.

Go to the location where you have installed the IDEA IDE and search for the following file:

idea64.exe.vmoptions

Change it accordingly.

-Xms4196m
-Xmx8092m
-XX:MaxPermSize=1000m
-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=1024m
-ea
-Dsun.io.useCanonCaches=false
-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true
-Djsse.enableSNIExtension=false
-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
-XX:SoftRefLRUPolicyMSPerMB=50

Also be aware of the 32-bit address space limit on Windows which makes it hard to use heap sizes higher than 750m. Should you need to use larger heap, make sure to switch to the 64-bit JVM first, otherwise IDE may crash on start or start to crash randomly during work.

score 0 · Answer 9 · answered Aug 28 '17 at 07:04

You might also check your IDEA_JDK_64, JAVA_HOME and JDK_HOME environmental variables. In my case I updated Java version and deleted previous directory containing JDK. Then IntelliJ started to dissapear from processes just a few seconds after launch. I changed all paths to point proper JDK directory and then it started to work as it should.

score 0 · Answer 10 · answered Apr 05 '19 at 06:15

Check the logs for error or issue in the path C:\Users\.IntelliJIdea14\system\log\idea.log.

If that report HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError

Go to VM options files in the path C:\Program Files\JetBrains\IntelliJ IDEA 2018.2.6\bin

Increase the -Xms750m to greater value say -Xms900m .

That solve the issue for me

score 0 · Answer 11 · answered Sep 02 '21 at 17:28

Had a similar issue.

idea64.exe just didn't start silently.

idea.bat printed just IDE is being shut down and didn't start either.

In my case there was no effect of manipulations with idea64.exe.vmoptions, but it helped to find and kill from Task Manager an invisible orphan idea64.exe process.

This solution was hinted by the first comment by @CrazyCoder at https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360009511720--Solved-Idea-Community-doesn-t-start-after-update-to-2020-1-4.

Intellij IDEA won't start

11 Answers11

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