I think the basic intellij config is set at max 2 gigs of RAM, so it doesn’t really matter how many you have unless you change that.

I really don’t know how did you manage to crash it, even with misbehaving plugins it will manage the situation gracefully (usually with a notification that this plugin had an exception) but will continue to run perfectly. Modifying files due to locking sounds like a Windows issue, and has nothing to do with intellij.

I really don’t know what have you configured for all these things to happen — what language was that project written in?