Java Heap Space Issues

Question

Greetings. I hope this is the right forum
I have a project, a chess program, that makes use of some very large static arrays. As I experiment with increasing the size of the arrays, I eventually run into heap space out of memory errors when instantiating these arrays.
My research has suggested various ways of adjusting the amount of memory available to the Java Runtime Environment. I am pretty sure I can deal with that.
My comment is that there does not appear to be a way to deal with this programmatically, from within my program. I'd like to make my program available on the web in applet form. If I do so it appears that I have to either limit the size of my arrays, or else instruct any potential user to adjust JVM settings themselves, outside of my program. Do I have this right?
Thanks.

Answer 1

ok I know nothing about jnlp but this looks promising. The following quote from that page suggests to me a way to package my program, with a minimum of modification, so that resources are allocated to the JVM before the application is loaded. The point being that the end user doesn't need to manually adjust the settings. Thanks, I'll give it a try.
By default, jar and nativelib resources will be downloaded eagerly, i.e., they are downloaded and available locally to the JVM running the application before the application is launched.  The jar and nativelib elements also allow a resource to be specified as lazy.  This means the resource does not have to be downloaded onto the client system before the application is launched.