title: Jmeter java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: GC overhead limit exceeded
body: <p>I'm using Jmeter to inject workload to an application deployed on an AWS EC2 instance. The test has to be very huge: it lasts for 10 hours and the workload profile has a bimodal shapes with a pitch of about 2600 requests in 5 minutes. Actually I have one m3.xlarge instance in which the application is deployed and 8 m3.xlarge instances each one running a jmeter instance. With a python script the workload to inject is splitted among the 8 client instances so in example if the original workload as to inject 800 requests, each jmeter instance will inject 100 requests. The full test as I said lasts for 10 hours and is divided into timesteps of 5 min each. Every 5 min a little workload variation is applied. Actually I get from each jmeter instance the java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: GC overhead limit exceeded error immediatly after the test is started and no request arrive to the application. I read a lot online and on stackoverflow, and I concluded the possible mistake could be:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><p>JMV heap size too low-> I solved setting the following in the jmeter.bat files in each jmeter instance:</p>
  
  <p>set HEAP=-Xms4g -Xmx4g</p>
  
  <p>set NEW=-XX:NewSize=4g -XX:MaxNewSize=4g    </p></li>
  <li><p>some mistakes in the code that results in a continue unuseful usage of the garbage collector. So I remove from my test all the jmeter listeners. In particular I was using TableVisualizer, ViewResultsFullVisualizer, StatVisualizer, and GraphVisualizer.</p></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Anyway the problem persists. I really have no idea about how to solve it. I know 10 hours of test with 2600 pitch request could be a very heavy test, but I think there should be a way to perform this. I'm using EC2 m3.xlarge instance so I could even raise the heap size to 8G if it could be useful, or splitting the workload among even more clients since I'm using spot instances so I will not pay so much more, but since I have already doubled the number of client instance from 4 to 8 in order to solve the problem and is doesn't work I'm a little bit confused and I want to know r suggestions before continue to get more and more resources. 
  Thank you a lot in advance.</p>