System.setProperty not being recognised by JVM

Question

Hi,
I am trying to change my heap size for an Applet without having to
get my users to set -Xmx in their plugIns.
To do this I am trying to set the System Parameter javaplugin.maxHeapSize programmatically using:-
System.out.println("MaxHeapSIze = " + System.getProperty("javaplugin.maxHeapSize"));
System.setProperty("javaplugin.maxHeapSize", "100m");
System.out.println("MaxHeapSIze = " + System.getProperty("javaplugin.maxHeapSize"));
This appears to work in that it prints out a trace to say heap was 64m
before and 100m after the setProperty. However the JVM is still using
a heap of 64m as I get an OutOfMemory Error when the heap gets to 64m.
Presumable this is because the JVM is still using the value it had at
start-up.
Is there a way to tell it to use the new value ?
Sue

Answer 1

Shouldn't the user have their own local timezone value
where the applet is downloaded to?Yes they do, but since we have server side code in a different timezone from some of our clients, any Date objects passed from server to client are interpreted incorrectly on these clients. I figured that setting the timezone on the client to be equal to the server's timezone would solve this problem (I'm talking JVM timezone here, not OS timezone).
SecurityException - if a security manager exists and
its checkPermission method doesn't allow setting of
the specified property. Yes, but it doesn't seem to be throwing any exceptions when I call setProperty. Plus, when I call getProperty to inspect the value I just set, it shows the new value. However, the JVM still behaves as if the old value was still in use.
Alternatively, is it possible to set JVM parameters such as "-Duser.timezone = xxxx" from within the APPLET tag on the HTML page, so I don't have to use setProperty at all in the code?
Thanks,
Ken