When running gradlew test on the current main trunk branch (as of rev 1351) I get the following:

 [ant:junit] Could not create the Java virtual machine.
java.io.FileNotFoundException: C:\OpenSource\gradle\gradle-trunk\junitvmwatcher1
597336873.properties (The system cannot find the file specified)
        at java.io.FileInputStream.open(Native Method)
        at java.io.FileInputStream.<init>(FileInputStream.java:106)
   ...

This is because of the memory requirements of the jvm when testing. It will work for my configuration if the MaxPermSize is reduced to 128m.

I have included a patch to build.gradle to change this, but haven't tested this under a *nix OS.

BTW, requiring Xmx=1g and MaxPermSize=256m seem huge to me for the size of this project. This seems to indicate that something else is wrong with memory consumption, but at least this patch can get things working until the underlying memory issue could be addressed.

I understand that groovy will naturally be a permgen hog because every closure creates a new class which uses up permgen space. Since the test VM is only forked once (for speed), these will accumulate. Perhaps we need some other option, like Fork the VM for every 100 tests.