I think the actual limit is system dependent.  On my XP system, the
largest value I can use is "1578m" -- anything else can't reserve enough
space.  On my Mandrake 9.1 box, it's "1902m".  I believe that I recall
being able to use a much larger limit on Solaris, but I don't currently
have access to such a system to confirm.

Based on some posts from long ago, I found these limits by simply typing
the command "java -Xmx1092m", for instance, and seeing which ones
produced errors saying they couldn't get the space and which ones
produced a usage error telling me the options with the java command.

= Steve =

(sorry if this is a double posting, my nntp client is acting up)

To my knowledge the maximum heap size on an x86 (IA32) machine is 1.8GB.
This is because the underlying OS/system can not assign more than a 2GB
chunk to a single process.

Of course, you could always run multiple JVMs with 1.8GB heap each and
hence start using more than 2GB RAM, but I doubt this is what you are
looking for.

The solution would be to move to a 64bit machine.

-Moazam