memory usage

[Paul Phillips <pa...@partitura.com>]

I have a RedHat Linux box on which I am running tomcat 4.  The machine has 
1 gig of physical RAM.  Just out of curiousity, I ran the "free" command 
yesterday, and discovered to my horror that it appeared that virtually all 
of the 1 gig was being used up!  The machine had been running Tomcat only a 
couple of days.  And, every time I ran "free" the amount of free memory was 
slightly smaller.

So I did a PS -aux and found all these java processes - over 30.  After 
reading the archives of this list, I now know that those are threads, not 
processes, and that they are sharing the same memory space.

However - two questions.

1) Is the free command confused, and reporting much less free memory than I 
actually have?  When I look at the ps -aux output, there is nothing else 
there (other than all the java) that would account for anywhere near that 
kind of memory use.  Shutting down the tomcat server freed up nothing. 
However, a restart freed up about 3/4 of the memory on the machine.

2) Why is the memory use of Java gradually creeping upward?  I know about 
the reported memory leak when compiling jsp pages, but I just have a very 
tiny number of those (5 or 6), so certainly that isn't it.  I see the Java 
memory use slowly climbing (as reported by repeated invocations of "free", 
or ps, or top) even when no one is accessing the tomcat servets.  Why is 
this?

Thanks,
Paul Phillips



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