What happens when the JVM runs out of memory to allocate during run time?

Question

After thinking for a long time of a generic way to pose this question (and failing to find one) I\'m just going to ask it as a concrete example:

Suppose I have a Lin

Answer 1

-Xmx just defines the maximum size of the heap. It makes no guarantee on wether there is so much memory or not. It only ensures that the heap will never be bigger then the given value. That said, Option B.) will happen, an outOfMemoryError will be thrown.