It does.
I guess you mean the Gradle daemon. The client is what we call the small command line app that connects to the daemon that does the actual build.
And yes this setting is for the daemon only
Yes, but Gradle will stop forking more processes if there isn’t enough system memory. If that doesn’t work in some case, feel free to open an issue.
In general you’ll want to specify some reasonable limit for every forking task. See also Reduce default memory settings for daemon and workers · Issue #6216 · gradle/gradle · GitHub