Opening large heap or system dumps with Eclipse Memory Analyzer

Sometimes Eclipse Memory Analyzer (MA) our favorite tool for analyzing heap and system dumps dies to an OOM when opening LARGE heaps. When  opening these  large heapdumps ( system dumps or phd's > 4GB)  run Memory Analyzer with the following JVM options

-vm
/opt/IBM80/java/bin  
-Xms16000m   
-Xmx16000m   
-Xcompressedrefs        
-Xgcpolicy:gencon        

- These arguments are to be put in the eclipse.ini 
- Needs recent version of the JDK preferably the one under WAS (/opt/IBM80/java/bin)
- RAM on the machine needs to be at least the size of the JVM max heap on which the dump was taken.
- MA is NOT CPU bound. So any reasonably multi-core modern processor will do.
- We have seen times of up to 3 hours to parse phd heaps of around 4GB.
- For best performance heap analysis should be done as soon as it is opened otherwise the MA indexes which are maintained as soft references will be GCed and will need to be read back from the disk