How can I improve my code to avoid GC overhead limit error?

I'm getting this error message:
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: GC overhead limit exceeded

at catch block of this code:

try (BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(fileName))) 
	{
		System.out.println("Starting try block");
		
	    String line;
	    Row row;
	    Cell cell;
	    int rowIndex = 0;
	    while ((line = br.readLine()) != null) 
	    {
	        row = sheet.createRow(rowIndex);
	        String[] tokens = line.split("[|]");
	        for(int iToken = 0; iToken < tokens.length; iToken++) 
	        {
	            cell = row.createCell(iToken);
	            cell.setCellValue(tokens[iToken]);
	        }
	        rowIndex++;
	    }
	} 
	catch(Throwable e) 
	{
	    e.printStackTrace();
	}

The file I'm reading is large txt file (~90000KB).
After increasing VM memory to 2048K at run time I stopped getting HeapSize error but started getting GC error.
How can I modify the code to avoid the GC error?

I am guessing that Sheet, Row and Cell are classes from some Java spreadsheet API.

Here's the bad news.

The problem is that your code is building a large data structure that represents the spreadsheet in memory, and then writing it to a file. Apparently the data structure is larger than can be accommodated by your JVM's heap.

The second problem is that if you continue to use the aforementioned API in this way, you won't be able to reduce the memory utilization.

There are a few ways to address this:

1. Increase the heap size, and keep increasing it until you don't get OOMEs. If that means you need a machine with more RAM to run your application, get one.

2. If the API that you are using has a streaming mode for writing the data, use that. Or look for an alternative to this API that supports streaming.

3. Maybe there is a non-streaming spreadsheet API that uses less memory than the one you are currently using. (See @Holger's comment.)

4. Don't generate a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are (IMO) an inefficient way of representing data. Instead, output the data as a CSV file, a JSON file, an XML file or any other format that can easily be streamed.

5. If the "business types" insist on spreadsheets, you could maybe output the data as a CSV file and then use an external tool to create the spreadsheet from the CSV file.

The streaming version of POI is described here.