Can I start Looker with java -jar looker.jar start?

Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Sep 5, 2019

You can but it doesn’t mean you should. Using java -jar looker.jar start instead of our startup scripts in our docs means that the Looker process boots with Java’s default memory allocation. And Java’s memory allocation is much smaller than what we recommend in our docs. Because of this, the Looker process can crash and yield 502 errors with:

NoMethodError : undefined method exception’ for java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: GC overhead limit exceeded:Java::JavaLang::OutOfMemoryError`

messages in the logs. For best results, always recommend using the startup scripts!