title: How Much Memory Can I Allocate?
body: <p>If I have 16 GB of RAM on my machine, how much can I allocate to a java command line program I'm executing? I assume <code>java -Xmx 16g...</code> will crash my system?</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT:</strong><br>
  In light of the comments, I tried <code>java -Xmx16g...</code>, and it did not crash my machine. The program still ran out of memory. I tried <code>java -Xmx32g...</code>, which did crash my machine.  </p>
  
  <p>From the comments below (which have been really enlightening), I guess I just need to keep playing around with the allocations.</p>