Setting memory-chunk-size claimed when free-memory approaches zero?

Wed Nov 24 19:14:00 GMT 2004

Bryce McKinlay wrote:
>>>>But neither happens - my application gets terminated by the Linux 
>>kernel...
>>>>Now, the real question: Is there a way to circumvent this? Can I 
>>configure the chunk-eating-mechanism so that it does not allocate 
>>chunks larger than, say, 100kb at a time...
>>>> GCJ's garbage collector does not, by default, set a maximum heap size. 
> This means that it will keep requesting more memory from the system, if 
> required, until VM is exhausted. On Linux systems this might mean that 
> the kernel kills your application.
>> The way to avoid this is to set the maximum heap size to the maximum 
> amount of memory you want your application to use. You can do this by 
> setting the environment variable GC_MAXIMUM_HEAP_SIZE=<bytes>
>If you do set GC_MAXIMUM_HEAP_SIZE, then you should also probably set the
divisor to a larger value (I forget the exact name of the variable). If
you use the default divisor value with a limited memory setting you can run
into situations where you get OutOfMemoryError which can be eliminated with
a larger divisor. We use a divisor value of 20.
David Daney.