Letting the Heap slowly bleed to death

Here's someone on the HotSpot forum asking for something many of us have thought about but been too lazy to ask the experts - Run with massive heap until OutOfMemory but with no pauses.

This, you've gotta read if you write high performance code or never really knew how those things like L1/L2 Cache, Associative Caches affect your program. The things that you read about in Computer Architecture courses in your Comp Sci/Engg course all those years ago - Gallery of Processor Cache Effects.