Get JVM to grow memory demand as needed up to size of VM limit?

Question

We ship a Java application whose memory demand can vary quite a lot depending on the size of the data it is processing. If you don\'t set the max VM (virtual memory) size

Answer 1

In comments you say that the amount of memory that your application actually depends on the input dataset size provided by the user. This suggests that instead of trying to grab all available virtual memory (which may cause problems for the user's other applications) you should be looking at the input dataset size before you start the JVM and using that to estimate the amount of memory the application will need.

Suppose that the user's machine is configured with modest physical memory and a huge swap space. If you launch the JVM with a huge VM size, it could cause severe "thrashing" as the JVM tries to access data in non-resident pages. By contrast, if you give the JVM something more than the application needs and less than the available physical memory, you should be able to run comfortably without thrashing.