Could not reserve enough space for object heap

Question

I am getting the following exception repeatedly each time I try to run the program.

Error occurred during initialization of VM

Could not reserve e

Answer 1

I ran into this when using javac, and it doesn't seem to pick up on the command line options,

-bash-3.2$ javac -Xmx256M HelloWorldApp.java 
Error occurred during initialization of VM
Could not reserve enough space for object heap
Error: Could not create the Java Virtual Machine.
Error: A fatal exception has occurred. Program will exit.

so the solution here it so set _JAVA_OPTIONS

-bash-3.2$ export _JAVA_OPTIONS="-Xmx256M"
-bash-3.2$ javac HelloWorldApp.java 
Picked up _JAVA_OPTIONS: -Xmx256M

And this compiles fine.

This happens to me on machines with a lot of RAM, but with lower memory ulimits. Java decides to allocate a big heap because it detects the ram in the machine, but it's not allowed to allocate it because of ulimits.