diff --git a/CHANGES.txt b/CHANGES.txt
index 6e82d11145..8a0ce59d42 100644
--- a/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/CHANGES.txt
@@ -1,4 +1,5 @@
 1.0.12
+ * increase Xss to 160k to accomodate latest 1.6 JVMs (CASSANDRA-4602)
  * fix toString of hint destination tokens (CASSANDRA-4568)
  * (Hadoop) fix setting key length for old-style mapred api (CASSANDRA-4534)
  * (Hadoop) fix iterating through a resultset consisting entirely
diff --git a/conf/cassandra-env.sh b/conf/cassandra-env.sh
index f1f2c43512..5400fd9653 100644
--- a/conf/cassandra-env.sh
+++ b/conf/cassandra-env.sh
@@ -150,7 +150,7 @@ if [ "`uname`" = "Linux" ] ; then
     # thread-per-client.  (Best practice is for client connections to
     # be pooled anyway.) Only do so on Linux where it is known to be
     # supported.
-    JVM_OPTS="$JVM_OPTS -Xss128k"
+    JVM_OPTS="$JVM_OPTS -Xss160k"
 fi
 
 # GC tuning options