Why would the StringBuffer have a limit on its size?
I went through some of the links : http://www.coderanch.com/t/540346/java/java/maximum-size-hold-String-buffer.
Is that because of the count member variable, which is an int?
Suppose that we have 2^31-1 chars in StringBuffer and that we append some more chars to that StringBuffer. Count member variable would be incremented by the number of chars appended and if Count variable is already at its max (2^31-1), it would revert back to some negative value.
Why would it throw an error?
Answer
because stringbuffer internally uses an array and the maximum number of elements an array can accommodate is 2^31-1 if you increment after reaching this it will go to negative and throws the error