no-administration heap?

[Jon Masamitsu]

Colin,

There was a discussion on this alias last July
under "-XX:+MaximizeHeapSize".

http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/hotspot-gc-dev/2007-July/000036.html

Is that the type of thing you are thinking about?

Jon

Colin Walters wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Essentially, my question is: Why do I have to set a maximum heap size
> (and PermGen space)?  Practically speaking, it means I have to become
> a system administrator for my Eclipse installation (and other JVM
> apps).  I kept having it abort, until I tracked it down to it hitting
> the maximum heap size and not being able to allocate any more.
> 
> It looks like the heuristics are improved in J2SE 5
> (http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/vm/gc-ergonomics.html), but
> it's still a fixed limit.
> 
> At least for desktop applications such as Eclipse, what I would like
> is a much more user-friendly system where the application uses as much
> heap as it needs.  From what I can tell, this is how the Boehm
> collector works, which is used by a number of projects like Python,
> Mono, etc.  I understand there could be performance impact, but it
> makes more sense to me to have a default policy where VM options are a
> tuning tweak, not a required change if your application loads a large
> file, plugins, etc.