running Maxent on MacOSX

[Elizabeth Jones]

I am running MAXENT on Mac OS X10.4 (Tiger) and have a relatively
simple question. The tutorial and readme file included with the
program state that in order to start the program I have to enter "java
-mx###m -jar maxent.jar" in a command shell in order to start the
program, where ### is the amount of memory I want to make available to
the program. For me, however, the program starts on its own when I
double click on maxent.jar. Is there a reason I shouldn't or can't
start the program this way? The only thing I can think is that
perhaps my computer will not allot enough memory to the program unless
I use a command shell to specify this. Does anyone know for sure?

Thanks!
Elizabeth

[Guillermo Duran]

I have the same question for running MAXENT on Linux.

[Steven Phillips]

Elizabeth and Guillermo,

Older versions of Java always use a maximum of 64 MB of memory by
default. That may be enough for your data, in which case there's no
problem just clicking on the jar file. If you run out of memory, you
can switch to using the -mx###m flag.

Newer versions of Java may use more memory by default. I don't know
about Mac OS X, but I believe Java 5.0 and later running on linux
machines with at least 2 processors and 4GB of memory will use 1GB by
default. See:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/vm/gc-ergonomics.html

-- Steven