Max memory for 64bit Java

Question

Hi,

What's the maximum amount of heap space that one can allocate for java on a 64-bit platform? Is it unlimited?

Regards, Raymond Barlow

Answer 1

If you could make every atom in the universe into a byte of RAM, you could allocate it in a 64 bit address space.

Actually, that's a slight exaggeration.

There are 10^80 atoms in the universe (according to WolframAlpha), and 2^64 bytes of address space in a 64 bit system, so you'd only be able to address 1 out of every 5x10^60 atoms. But if you have 18 qintillion bytes of RAM, you'd probably need a couple of quantum black holes to power it with.

Answer 2

In theory its between 2^63 and 2^64 bytes.

In practice it is limited by the amount of physical memory and swap space available on your machine. And the physical memory is in turn limited by your chipset (i.e. the number of address pins on the physical memory address bus) and motherboard (i.e. the number and size of the DIMM sockets).

Answer 3

This probably depends on the system your VM is running in. If you are running a AMD x64 architecture the address space of currently shipped processors uses 48 Bits, not 64. This results in a theoretical maximum of roughly 256 TB. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64)

I am not a specialist in VMs, but any modern OS typically will give as much memory as there is physical RAM plus available virtual memory. Probably thats what the VM will pass to your application depending on its configuration.

Answer 4

With recent VMs from Sun, the practical heap limit size is usually 512 times the available physical and/or virtual memory. Even if the theoretical limit is much higher, the VM will allocate 1 byte for maangement purposes for each 512 bytes of heap memory on startup, so 1TB of heap will immediately require 2GB for the memory management.