Issue
This question is related to Java Refuses To Start - Could Not Resrve Enough Space for Object Heap and should be easy enough to figure out. However; my searches haven't yielded anything useful.
Essentially we have 2 32 bit OS's (RedHat & SuSE) on different machines with the same hardware. Both use the same JVM both executing the same command line. RedHat works perfectly fine but SuSE reports there isn't enough Memory.
We just need to know if this is a limitation of the version of SuSE we're using or if it's something else.
'cat /proc/version' gives us:
Linux version 2.6.5-7.244-bigsmp (geeko@buildhost) (gcc version 3.3.3 (SuSE Linux)) #1 SMP Mon Dec 12 18:32:25 UTC 2005
'uname -a' gives us the following on BOTH types of machines:
UTC 2005 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
Solution
The JVM memory limit is related the largest free contiguous block available, not the amount of free memory. The limit varies from about 1.4 GB to a bit over 2.0 GB, and depends on where your operating system puts various things in memory. I don't know the particulars of where Redhat or Suse load stuff into memory, but it could be that suse is mapping some library to an address in the middle of RAM, where Redhat might map it at the end (speculating).
And remember that your actual memory usage in java is more than what you specify for Xmx. The other memory settings also affect the size of your heap (like permgen). So it could also be that the perm space on Suse has a larget default than on Redhat.
Also, depending on the memory allocation profile of your application, you might get away with a smaller heap size and different garbage collecting options. There are some details here (http://java.sun.com/performance/reference/whitepapers/tuning.html) and other places. For example, if you allocate a lot of small, temporary blocks, you'll want different GC settings than if you have a lot of bit, long-lived objects.
Regarding the linked question, why not just use Redhat? That might be a simplistic solution, but I guarantee it's going to fix your problem faster than deeply delving into the arcane world of java tuning and OS memory management :P
Answered By - Seth Answer Checked By - Pedro (WPSolving Volunteer)