In our large banking application, java applets crash firefox in severe memory shortage situations. We suspect the java plugin NOT to check the malloc result which is null. As a workaround, we have the idea to test memory availability in advance such that we at least may prevent firefox from crashing by refusing to load the applets. But how much memory does the java plugin allocate and how many chunks will be needed? We are going to explore stackdumps to find out but suggestions are much appreciated.