I know this is old, but which version of the grail did you use? I had the same problem after moving from column 2.3 to grail 2.5.
After some pretty painful research, I found that the problem was running tests with the new fork mode properties, and they are easy to solve by removing these parameters from BuildConfig.groovy:
grails.project.fork = [ // configure settings for compilation JVM, note that if you alter the Groovy version forked compilation is required //compile: [maxMemory: 256, minMemory: 64, debug: false, maxPerm: 256, daemon:true], // configure settings for the test-app JVM, uses the daemon by default test: false, // configure settings for the run-app JVM run: [maxMemory: 1536, minMemory: 512, debug: false, maxPerm: 1024, forkReserve:false], // configure settings for the run-war JVM war: [maxMemory: 1536, minMemory: 512, debug: false, maxPerm: 1024, forkReserve:false], // configure settings for the Console UI JVM console: [maxMemory: 1536, minMemory: 64, debug: false, maxPerm: 1024] ]
Sincerely.
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