diff --git a/pom.xml b/pom.xml
index de98f72e3ee..9959c7944d9 100644
--- a/pom.xml
+++ b/pom.xml
@@ -611,7 +611,8 @@
                     <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
                     <configuration>
                         <!-- locale settings must be set on the command line before startup -->
-                        <argLine>-Duser.language=en -Duser.country=US -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.logging.log4j.jul.LogManager</argLine>
+                        <!-- set heap size to work around https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-ci/issues/3396 -->
+                        <argLine>-Xmx1024m -Duser.language=en -Duser.country=US -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.logging.log4j.jul.LogManager</argLine>
                         <!-- our tests are very verbose, let's keep the volume down -->
                         <redirectTestOutputToFile>true</redirectTestOutputToFile>
                     </configuration>