Java array with more than 4gb elements

Question

I have a big file, it\'s expected to be around 12 GB. I want to load it all into memory on a beefy 64-bit machine with 16 GB RAM, but I think Java does not support byte arra

Answer 1

Java arrays use integers for their indices. As a result, the maximum array size is Integer.MAX_VALUE.

(Unfortunately, I can't find any proof from Sun themselves about this, but there are plenty of discussions on their forums about it already.)

I think the best solution you could do in the meantime would be to make a 2D array, i.e.:

byte[][] data;