Since I upgraded not to long ago to a new version of Java on Ubuntu. It looks like the JVM on my particular configuration now defaults to running in Server mode whereas previously that used to be client mode.

The main problem I have with that is that it makes the Gradle daemon consume considerably more memory which causes my machine to start using the swap memory and paging. That is quite annoying.

What I observe when running Gradle STS tests on my machine is that memory usage of my machine which runs 32 bit OS and JVM and has 4Gb of RAM goes from around 20% (includes one STS instance running) before starting the tests to fully utilizing all memory and just starting to spill over into swap. This includes two instances of Eclipse STS and two daemons spawned for running two different version of Gradle (M3 and M4). After the tests exit one of the STS instances (the one executing the tests) goes away but the daemons remain active. Leaving my memory consumption around 80%. Most of this memory seems to be going to the two daemon processes. (Though the STS's are probably heavier processes, I am running the STS's with -client which seems to be much friendlier towards memory usage).

There seems to be no way for me to control this option (or any other ones?), for the daemon process spawned by the tooling API so I am guessing they are running in "server" mode.

Though this may be rather specific to a user's machine, JVM version etc. I suggest adding the -client option as a default may be a good idea. If not, at least it should be able for a tooling API client to control the setting of this option (and possible other JVM options) that are passed to the daemon process.

This is major issue to me, because it makes my machine rather unpleasant to use.