Adjusting Client Memory Requirements

By default, the omero clients allocate a certain amount of memory for themselves during the startup process which should be sufficient for most uses. However, when dealing with very large images, you may encounter out of memory exceptions while trying to import or display these large images. In these situations, it is beneficial to increase the memory allocation to the clients as outlined below.

NOTE: Increasing the memory of your client applications depends on two factors: the operating system and the client you're using. Also note that this guide does not cover OMERO.web, which uses a different server-based configuration setup.

Macintosh Importer & Insight

• Locate the OMERO.importer.app or OMERO.insight.app and right click (or control+click) on it, choose ''Show Package Contents''
• Navigate to the ''Contents'' folder
• Click on the ''Info.plist'' file, this should open the file in the either Xcode (if you have that installed), or the Property List Editor.
• Within !Xcode/Property List Editor, click and open the 'Java' tab.
• Under VMOptions, you will see a line such as ''-Xmx512M''. This means you currently have 512 Megabytes reserved for the importer to use. Increase this to something like ''-Xmx1024M'' if you wish to increase the allocated size to 1024 Megabytes.

Windows Importer & Insight

• To alter the memory allocation of the windows clients, you must add an optional parameter file to the same folder as the application. For the OMERO.importer.exe application, this file should be named OMERO.importer.vmoptions, for the OMERO.insight.exe application, this file should be named OMERO.insight.vmoptions.
• The easiest way to get this file is to download either the OMERO.insight or OMERO.importer file attachment to this document, and copy it into the same directory as your exe file (either OMERO.importer.exe or OMERO.insight.exe). The default file increases the memory allocation to 1024 Megabytes, however you may if you choose, open the file in any text editor (such as notepad.exe) and change the value as described in the 'Macintosh Importer & Insight' entry above.

Unix/Linux Importer & Insight

• Changing either the importer or insight memory allocation under unix requires you to edit the startup script located with the clients (either importer-gui, importer-cli, or OMEROinsight_unix.sh file).
• For insight, you will need to edit the OMEROinsight_unix.sh file and change the java -Xms128000000 -Xmx256000000 -jar omero.insight.jar line with new minimum and preferred memory options (see the java online documentation [http://download.oracle.com/javase/1.3/docs/tooldocs/solaris/java.html here] for a full description of these options).
• For the importer, both the gui and cli versions list the required memory requirements near the top of the importer-gui & importer-cli scripts, and should look like this: JAVA_ARGS="-Xmx512M". Simply update the value to a larger number (as described in the Macintosh Importer & Insight' entry above).