= Increasing Heap Memory in the jMonkeyEngine SDK
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:revdate: 2016/03/17 20:48
:keywords: documentation, sdk, faq
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If you've been working on a large scene in the SDK, there is a good chance that you will need to increase the size of Java's heap space (which is quite small by default). link:http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-08-1996/jw-08-gc.html[What is heap space?]

To increase the amount of heap space allocated to the SDK, we must navigate to the SDK's installation directory and edit the etc/jmonkeyplatform.conf file.

The installation directory for Mac and Windows is:

*+++<abbr title="Operating System">OS</abbr>+++ X:* Applications/jmonkeyplatform.app/Contents/Resources/jmonkeyplatform/jmonkeyplatform

*Windows:* C:\Program Files\jmonkeyplatform

Tweaking the parameters to be right is quite a task because sometimes when specifing a too large value, the JRE might fall back to it's default value of (for example) 32 +++<abbr title="Megabyte">MB</abbr>+++. Also there are different values to increase. Take a look at your Error Message, it will show you whether you ran out of “Heap Space or “Direct Memory.

In the config file you look for default_options=“.
If you ran out of Heap Space increase the Value of -Xmx=512m to like 1024m or even further.
If you ran out of Direct Memory, increase -XX:MaxDirectMemorySize=256M

Note that Increasing the Heap Space might also fix problems where you ran out of DirectMemory.