java.lang.OutOfMemoryError even though plenty of

Question

I am trying to read a 2.5GB txt file into my application. I am running Win7 x64 and have 43GB of mem available (out of 64GB). I tried playing around with -Xmx -XX:MaxParmS

Answer 1

You're trying to allocate an array that is too large. This is because you're trying to create a very long String. Since arrays are indexed by an integer, an array cannot have more than Integer.MAX_VALUE elements. Even if the your heap size is very large, you won't be able to allocate an array that has more than Integer.MAX_VALUE elements, simply because you cannot index its elements using an Integer. See Do Java arrays have a maximum size? for more details.