Running a server with 7 gigs of ram on a 4 gig computer?

Okay so.. I recently did some experimenting with my home hosted server and noticed that I could start the server with it running on 7 gigs of RAM, even though the server computer only has 4 gigs of RAM available.
No clue why this is happening, so for now I'm setting the server to 3 gigs just to be safe.

Also, I highly doubt that the RAM itself is corrupted as everything else is running like normal and the RAM is less than a year old.
Here's the servers .BAT file.

@Echo OFF
SET BINDIR=%~dp0
CD /D "%BINDIR%"
:start
java -Xms3000M -Xmx8000M -jar spigot.jar -o true
goto start

It would be interesting if anyone else has this problem and if there's an explanation for it.

Thanks!
~ Zeckll

 

You basically told the server that it can use up to 7 gigs, but it's not going to use all 7 if it doesn't actually need it. Also, 7 gigs is a lot. If you're homehosting, I'd guess you probably aren't expecting a whole lot of traffic on the server, (10 players max maybe), and 1, maybe 2 gigs should be fine for that unless it's going to be very heavily modded (and I mean very).

I'm not sure what the actual problem with your situation is though. It's interesting, but it doesn't seem like it would be a problem unless the computer actually tried to use all 7 gigs - and I'm rather curious to know what would happen if it did. And you could always just lower the allocated ram to remove that possibility.

 

Yeah, as I said in the post I was just experimenting. I'm running an old server I used to admin on that shut down that had a fairly large community so I expect a fair amount of players on it. (15-20 maybe).
Thanks for the help!
~ Zeck