I've "maximized" the available application space by using these settings in
the preferences file, perhaps the pde "editor" could add "[x] large memory
model"

anyway, here it is:

# settings for the -XmsNNNm and -XmxNNNm command line option
run.options.memory = false
run.options.memory.initial = 128
run.options.memory.maximum = 512

# example of increasing the memory size for applets run externally
run.options = -Xms512m -Xmx1024m -ss 512k


This was pretty much the most I could do, establishing a huge stack that
can do more than any processing I'd used before. I was able to load huge
images and large amounts of data doing this. (like 40 HD 1400x900 sized
truecolor images + 400,000 unique data points of >64 bytes each)

This is already covered here:
http://processing.org/reference/troubleshooting/index.html#memory

And can be handled in the Preferences dialog box.