I went thru Inductive's support for this. Turns out...it's a known bug.
Steve,
So I was just showing this to some of our developers and it turns out there is actually an open bug ticket for this issue that is still in progress. Apparently this bug comes up only when you go through these steps: Launch the Native Client Launcher (NCL) and then launch the designer from the NCL, then once you're in the designer you launch the vision client in published or staging mode. Normally the designer is supposed to 'pass' it's max memory setting onto a vision client, if it's launched from the designer. And with the NCL it is supposed to download these settings from the Gateway when it goes to launch the designer, but that is where this bug lies, the NCL is not correctly downloading this setting from the Gateway so it defaults the designer to 256 MB in the code. And I was able to recreate this bug on my 7.9.16 Gateway as well.
So for the time being your best bet is going to be to launch the dseigner.jnlp file without the NCL, and then launch the client from there and it should have the same max memory as the designer. So if you set the designer max memory to 4 GB your client should have 4 GB if it's launched from there. Or you could launch the client .jnlp files directly and they will use the correct max memory specified from your project properties settings. I've clicked 'follow' on the internal bug ticket so I'll get emails with updates on it, and I'll let you know when I have some more information on the progress of this issue. Let me know if you have any questions on this.
Thanks,
Mytchell Beaton
Support Services Engineer
Inductive Automation
(800) 266-7798
Outside US: +1 (916) 456-1045
support@inductiveautomation.com
Seems to me this is a pretty serious issue that should not have spanned 4 releases of the 7.9 platform (7.9.12 to 7.9.16). I mean, the embedded NCL is what everyone uses, right?
As you were...
Steve