6 Java memory limits

ArtiSynth applications often require a large amount of memory, requiring that the memory limit for the Java virtual machine be set fairly high (perhaps to several gigabytes). By contrast, the default Java memory limit set by MATLAB is often much lower, and so it may be necessary to increase this.

If the memory limit is too low, you may get an out-of-memory error, which generally produces a stack trace on the MATLAB console along with an error message of the form

The standard way to increase the MATLAB Java memory limit is from the Preferences menu:

Preferences > MATLAB > General > Java Heap Memory

MATLAB will need to be restarted for any change of settings to take effect.

Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, MATLAB limits the maximum memory size that can be set this way to about 1/4 of the physical memory on the machine, and lower limits have been reported on some systems. If you need more memory than the preferences settings are willing to give you, then you can try creating or editing the java.opts file located in $MATLABROOT/bin/$ARCH, where $MATLABROOT is the MATLAB installation root directory and $ARCH is an architecture-specific directory. Within the java.opts file, you can use the -Xmx option to increase the memory limit. As an example, the following -Xmx settings specify memory limits of 128 Mbytes, 2 Gbytes and 4 Gbytes, respectively:

More details are given in www.mathworks.com/support/solutions/en/data/1-18I2C.