Today I had a issue with PHPstorm related to memory issue. It was running so slow. At one point it became unresponsive, so i was clicking continuously. Then I was asked to increase memory by increasing the value of xmx.
I increased the memory to 1024MB but still it wasn't running smooth but it was atleast running. I had increased max files to keep open to 50. So, it needed more RAM to keep up with the load, and I got the same message again to increase memory.
This time I increased it to 1536MB and shutdown the PHPStorm code editor. But I was unable to restart PHPstorm after this increase. This was the message I was getting:
"The JVM could not be started. The maximum heap size (-Xmx) might be too large or an antivirus or firewall tool could block the execution."
So, I had to manually update the setting file to fix and reuse PHPstorm by editing this file:
C:\Program Files (x86)\JetBrains\PhpStorm 4.0.2\bin\PhpStorm.exe.vmoptions
You need to open that file with Notepad or Notepad++ and update -xmx value.
This is what it looks in mine:
-Xms128m -Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=250m -XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=64m -ea
I have done the bad thing (increased the Xmx size max value) like you