edit solved. Thanks offbeatdrizzle (see below for details)

Hi, I have a 64 bit windows 10 computer, 64 bit processor, and the 64 bit version of the netbeans IDE, and 16 gigabytes of RAM.

I run my application from the command prompt using "java -jar ApplicationName.jar -Xmx6144m"

the JVM at runtime then tells me it only has a max memory of 3618 MiB (using maxMem), and it de facto hits that limit when I start filling up RAM with objects, too. It never gives me an error, it just goes up to that limit and hangs forever, so I think it's paging the rest of the memory I'm asking it to use.

I have 5-6 gigs sitting around on my machine doing nothing even after it's hit its limit.

How do I get it to actually use those, as I should be able to on a 64 bit hardware and OS?