NetBeans Out of Memory Updating Ruby Gems

I got a message "Exception in thread "main" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space" while updating Ruby Gems in NetBeans 6.0.1 on Windows XP. It took a little longer than usual for me to find reports of this problem using Google, but when I did I found that it is a known problem.

Someone suggested changing the command line arguments to NetBeans to increase the size of the memory for the JVM, but that didn't work for me. Instead, I figured out how to load gems from the command line, and once I did that one time, I was able to use the gem manager in NetBeans.

So, in more detail: Originally I had installed NetBeans from a privileged account using all the default options. To get new gems, in a non-privileged account, I had to create two environment variables with the following values:

set JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_05
set JRUBY_BASE=C:\Program Files\NetBeans 6.0.1\ruby1\jruby-1.0.2

Your values may differ, particularly the version numbers. I wrote it here as you'd do it in the command prompt window, but I actually did it using the System control panel.

I opened a comment prompt window and did:

%JRUBY_BASE%\bin\gem install login_generator

After a couple of minutes, everything seemed to end normally. I did Tools->Ruby Gems from a running NetBeans instance and didn't get the desired results, so I restarted NetBeans and then Tools->Ruby Gems got me a list of gems, including login_generator as an installed gem.